The KISS-off for virtualisation
Roberto Maietta has posted an interesting Talkback outlining what he sees as the pitfalls of virtualisation .
"I look at this in terms of security updates, in fact any kind of updates, and it makes me shudder," he writes. "If you had a citrix farm with 10 servers for 500 clients, who were running a wise terminal, then you only have to patch a small number of devices. This is the benefit of a centralised computing model.
"On the other hand, when you introduce virtual computing, every business department wants to have a host for every application, and you typically end up with a huge number of devices that need to be patched."
But member Arthur B. counters that a Citrix setup, like virtualisation, goes against the guiding principle of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). With workers bringing in PDAs, laptops, etc., it's rare to find such a setup that links to dumb terminals only.
It looks like IT managers are still working out if there are real-world benefits to virtualisation, and another case where mobile working could call for creative thinking.