Real World Computing
Installing Server 2008
There are several other weighty considerations, though. If you're going to have VMs provisioned on servers, then those servers will need to be big enough to carry the load. The old metrics that prescribe how many Terminal Server users you can get per server will no longer apply of course, because you'll be provisioning a whole native OS rather than just a per-user instantiation of one. But this allows you to have a rack of blade servers, for example, and provision VMs and applications out of a centralised computing core. This might well be a much better idea than stuffing a lot of compute power into each and every desktop PC, where you have to consider the power and cooling requirements. In this new green era, shutting down blades that aren't in use is potentially much easier than managing desktops left idly showing their screensaver.
The next casualty will be network bandwidth and management. No longer will you be able to get along by slinging some basic "electric string" around the office. You'll need to think very carefully indeed about network traffic loads. There might be significant shifts in loading during the course of a workday for example, and separation into VLANs will probably become mandatory to ensure adequate control.
Finally, licensing - that old bugbear rears its head again. The real problem here is that the licensing model from Microsoft doesn't yet take into account the need for fluidity in this model. If I install Office into a VM, does it belong to that VM or to its user? What about demand-loaded applications? What about concurrent usage? At present if I put an app, for example Office, into a Terminal Server session, then I need a TS CAL licence as well. How are we going to manage all of this in future?
The answer is "with great difficulty". The cold reality is that Microsoft's licensing model can't cope with the realities of today, let alone the issues of tomorrow.
Consider the extraordinary lack of clarity that surrounds Enterprise Server licensing and its VMs, which I covered here last month. And this is an easy problem compared to the question of "who had that Office licence and where was it actually running"? Microsoft needs to revolutionise its licensing policy, and the only way to make sure this happens is by repeating something I've been banging on about for years. Microsoft doesn't use MS Licensing internally with anything like the same degree and rigour that it demands from its customers. As soon as Microsoft staff are forced to jump through the same licensing hoops that we're made to, then it will start to understand the pain that we suffer. And only when a manager internal to Redmond has to wade through this fog of licensing doublespeak will something finally be done to sort things out.
Microsoft HPC Server 2008 Beta 2
All the new management capabilities in System Center Configuration Manager are very applicable to the HPC Server version of Windows Server, a relatively little known version of Server. Microsoft has been making some significant headway into the large scale computation farm marketplace with the existing HPC server product.
Obviously, building a huge data processing farm is not for the faint-hearted. Harnessing all that processing capability means making sure that your application can be spread across a large number of machines, with each instance typically working on a small part of a bigger overall problem. It doesn't have to be heavily coupled - indeed, the FoldingAtHome project works very well across a global network of Sony PlayStation 3 computers.
