Desktop Virtualization: The next big SMB move
I think, desktop virtualization technology has matured enough that it is now a great opportunity for small medium sized businesses to take advantage of great savings. I have played with the free open source VirtualBox by Sun Microsystems, showed a few colleagues of mine on how to take advantage of it - well here is a good story. A colleague of mine has an Old Palm PDA. He has been using the old software to save all his contact information. With a new desktop with a 64bit windows, he found out that his old Palm software does not run anymore. He approached me if I know of a way around. I showed him how he can install a windows 32bit on Virtualbox and then his old PDA software - he is now a happy camper. I also showed our IT Manager about this great product and a few months later I saw him showing this to our IT manager in our California office. Great to know how this is spreading.
But to actually reap even more benefits a hosted or streaming virtual desktop could be the way to go. I have Xenserver from Citrix installed onto a cheap dell server that I have been playing with for sometime now where I have several virtual servers running on the single dell server. (I am running a PBX, Couple of web servers with Drupal and Joomla, a few shopping carts, ERP on another virtual server and a Mysql server). But I did a bad investment on the Dell server because the AMD CPU that came with it is not optimized for virtualization. Or maybe it is time to spend some more money.
Anyway, to learn more about what you can do with Desktop Virtualization see these videos: