It's time to refresh what we're using for desktop machines here in Technical Services. We'll be whiteboxing this for a couple of reasons:
That said, it'll be a Core2 Duo config. Several of us are actively considering using virtualization on these stations as mainline, rather than development. One is going to be using a bare install of Windows as the Host OS and doing everything productiony in a guest on VMWare. The guest snap-shot abilities of VMWare are the prime reason he wants to do that, as that beats the pants off of Microsoft's "system restore" process.
Me? I just spent about an hour reading up on Xen in SLES10. So far only SLES10 is supported as a guest OS, which is dissapointing. WinXP is in 'technical preview, don't use it,' mode. One thing that Xen doesn't support very well is CD-Burners, which will be tricky to engineer around. I had higher hopes for Xen. Perhaps SLES10 SP1 will have improvements? Hard to say.
- The guy who is doing the whiteboxing did it for a living before he got out of the business due to low margins.
- At no time will ATUS be servicing these machines, we'll be doing all the support ourselves.
- Part-reuse, such as optical devices, brings the price down noticably.
That said, it'll be a Core2 Duo config. Several of us are actively considering using virtualization on these stations as mainline, rather than development. One is going to be using a bare install of Windows as the Host OS and doing everything productiony in a guest on VMWare. The guest snap-shot abilities of VMWare are the prime reason he wants to do that, as that beats the pants off of Microsoft's "system restore" process.
Me? I just spent about an hour reading up on Xen in SLES10. So far only SLES10 is supported as a guest OS, which is dissapointing. WinXP is in 'technical preview, don't use it,' mode. One thing that Xen doesn't support very well is CD-Burners, which will be tricky to engineer around. I had higher hopes for Xen. Perhaps SLES10 SP1 will have improvements? Hard to say.