TOTAL OWNERSHIP COST
Macs Cost LESS than PCs
Ping!
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Swordmaker's BACK!
Posted on 03/19/2010 3:15:37 AM PDT by Swordmaker
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Swordmaker's BACK!
Macs rock. Just the facts!
I don’t have an apple yet, but it doesn’t surprise me. Microsoft seems to be wandering in the wilderness when it comes to windows these days.
I have only owned one PC. I buckled under the pressure to replace my aging, yet fully functional Mac SE with a Dell something or other.
It is truly amazing how many little tiny pieces a PC breaks into when you clobber it with a sledgehammer
:)
From their website: "Making it easy to deploy, integrate and manage Macs in a Windows environment."
And global warming is real, too.
Got to remember that the it was to folks who do graphic designs/multimedia work.
My faithful 15 inch MacBook Pro with Intel chip runs without complaint day after day, year after year. I keep the OS up to date (Snow Leopard), and upgrading so far has been painless
I have a Dell Studio 8000 which I use for various tasks around home. Just converted to Windows 7, and am still trying to find my way.
I like the Studio 8000, and love the MacBook Pro.
Off-topic, but last night I installed the VMWare workstation 7.1 beta on my Fedora12 desktop last night after having spent way too much time trying to get Server running. OMG, but that was the easiest vmware installation I've ever seen on Linux! For once, no patching was required. So far haven't hit any bugs, and have done some initial testing with both some pre-existing VMs and built a couple of new Fedora VMs. Overall, things seem to finally be coming together for VMWare on Linux. It's always pissed me off that you had to jump through hoops on previous versions considering VMWare itself is built on Linux.
..and kickin' off with three new Mac Pings, to boot!
As the drunken Scotsman said when awoke on the roadside,
"Well, Laddie, I denna ken where ye've been -- but I see ye won first prize!"
Welcome BACK! '-)
For you.
Virtualization is actually a boon for the Mac at the client end. There's no way to run OS X on a virtual machine (*), but Macs can run Windows VMs with fewer support hassles than Windows boxes. Citrix has had a Mac client for at least a decade, and they're even promising a client for the iPad.
It's not a recipe for the Mac to take over a dominant position in enterprise computing, but that's not a very realistic near-term goal anyway. With virtualization, companies can continue to develop enterprise applications on Windows, and then run them on Macs or Linux or whatever.
* Macs support netbooting, which is kinda close enough to a virtual machine, but it only runs on Mac clients.
Well, where the hell have YOU been?
Captain Obvious phoned this in.
The other thing is that if Apple wants to gain server share at some point, they are going to have to allow virtualization, which is becoming more and more common for many reasons, including the need to prevent “server sprawl.”
That said, I do believe that a Mac network would be easier to maintain than a Windows network. Mac networks of any size don’t really exist, though, outside of academia and the occasional design house. This is partially because vertical apps are largely written in VB/ASP/.NET by foreigners generating code out of a framework.
Also, VMware had better get on the ball. While VMware workstation may work well on Fedora, other VMware products are really falling behind on Linux support, and even the browser interface is buggy, which affects everyone. There are other virtualization options which will become more attractive if VMware doesn’t clean up its act.
I absolutely agree (see post 9 of this thread).
Funny thing is, 'server sprawl" is being replaced by "vm sprawl", because there is still a mentality amongst a lot of folks that you dedicate a box to a task. I've seen this where I work in a big way. The amount of resources wasted because of this mind-set is staggering. One of the things that has really annoyed me with the advent of virtualization in our organization is that it masks inefficiency, and poor design. We see these glowing reports about the huge number of servers being consolodated by our windows support group, (Hey! We're getting 40-1 consolidation on our servers!) yet no thought is given to the millions of dollars this group has wasted over the years because of their poor planning and other choices made. Over on the unix side of the house on the other hand, we're lucky to get 5-1 consolidation because we've been taking full advantage of our available hardware for years. Rather than having 40 individual webservers with maybe one or two apps on them, we run 40-50 sites apache servers on each box, so naturally you're not going to gain a hell of a lot when you move them to a VM farm.
I'm a big supporter of virtualization because it makes it much easier to take advantage of the advances that have come from the incredible increases in horsepower you see in hardware these days, but I think folk would do well to take a look at some of their other assumptions as well.
Meant to comment on this as well, but it looks like I had an ADD moment. I also agree with you about VMWare's linux support. I don't really think the other offerings have quite caught up with VMWare yet in most ways, though I see a place for them in an enterprise. Zen, in particular is some cool tech, but I personally like the greater degree of separation of instances provided through offerings more similar to VMWare.
One of our older VM farms has been experiencing regular catastrophic failures in recent months. I don't really know the cause, but when I chart our uptime stats for our unix servers, it is obvious which ones are VMs and which are still physical (200+days vs less than 30 on average. -We've got servers that have been up for 800+ days and I can tell you that they sure as hell aren't VMs.)
A lot of the reason this happens is due to the Windows philosophy of each application having its own dedicated machine.
Ask a Microsoft guy to lay out a basic network, and he’s going to recommend a AD/domain controller, app server and terminal server, each on their own dedicated machine.
At least with virtualization, this can be one or two machines instead of three.
Agreed. I think it points up a decided weakness in the architecture. The reason they insist on laying stuff out like this is because bad things happen for them when they don't. Once bitten twice shy.
At least with virtualization, this can be one or two machines instead of three.
Yup, but I'd say that it is basically covering up decisions made for their underlying tech. I'm always astounded when windows guys recommend 3rd party apps on windows boxes for something that is a native unix app. For instance we recently had a requirement to build out an FTP server. I'm not going to go into the fundamental insanity of running FTP in 2010 (anonymous FTP yes, but anytthing else is as fundamentally insane as using telnetd), but the requirement was there nonetheless. The recommendation from the windows guys was a dedicated server running some 3rd party app that I can't recall at the moment. We recommended an existing server running vsftp.
It's definitely a different mentality, and one that costs corporate America a lot of money every day.
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