Getting new hardware

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:
  1. The guy who is doing the whiteboxing did it for a living before he got out of the business due to low margins.
  2. At no time will ATUS be servicing these machines, we'll be doing all the support ourselves.
  3. Part-reuse, such as optical devices, brings the price down noticably.
These are workstations for people who routinely use various God-level passwords and accounts. Our rank-n-file desktop support people aren't responsible for managing these stations.

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.