Re: Virtual desktop.

Staging to roll out.
First users will be all the existing Citrix users.
No new desktop computers. They will get these instead.
The claim is that it will be a hard sell to get a new laptop. You will be
encouraged to get this instead. If you must travel then a netbook or some
such device with just enough oomph to get into our network and fire up
your vmware will be the suggestion. I say "claim" because we've issued
standards around here before but as soon as management wants an exception
for some cronies it all quickly fades away.
Then how, and who, gets it for existing users will be fine tuned. There
is even some thought that systems will go this route. Engineers and
systems may run some compute intensive applications (CAD, RDP) on their
local machine but all office, etc should be on the server.

The server(s) storage will be on some SANs. We dipped our toes into the
water with an underpowered NetApp device. Grandiose idea was that it
would automatically replicate between two devices for instant failover. It
was so underpowered that we instead manually load balanced between the
two. And still had some issues we attributed to timeouts.

The load balancing, and our recent move of half of our computer equipment
is causing us to relook at comm. When we moved many of our Domino servers
(all i based) and our production systems to main office leaving one power
system back at our old main office for Mimix and Domino backup the comm
usage went through the roof. We've got two legs between the two offices.
With the new load we are upgrading one of the legs and it is doubtful the
other leg can carry the load during the upgrade. Shouldn't affect
interactive usage but it may cause some stacking up of journal entries
during periods of moderate load. But Domino clustering and replication is
the bulk of the load. Oy vey!


Rob Berendt