Work Stuff and such

Today I spend sometime mulling over deployment for vm's to a team of about 30 people. VMware madness is everywhere these days it would seem.

The requirement is to provide XP, Vista, Red Hat and Suse (all 32 and 64bit editions) on demand the team for test purposes.

Fair enough.

Right now, there is a project going on else where, examining the potential of vmware ace. I believe to be a very strong runner. I'm not totally up on how deployment would work with ACE. But from what I've seen, I most say it looks like a very strong candidate.

Right now, I'm looking at an initial test group of 4 people. Going to hit them tomorrow with XP 32bit and Red Hat EL 5 32 bit. I'm not worried at all about the Linux deployment, no need to concern myself with worrying about SIDS, root access was a problem, but we've come to a decent comprise with sudo. I'm pretty happy with that situation.

XP provides a different problem, initially I plan on using a stock syspreped image, which I'll kick off on all the hosts, give unique names, join domain, etc. But for larger deployment, I'm really hoping ACE will provide a better solution.

There are some other issues, that are outstanding, such as the quality of hosts. That's not a fight for this week though, I have another plan to tackle that one. I'm pretty sure the weakest of the hosts are going to be pretty much unusable for Vista 64bit.

Other stuff

One other thing on my mind at the moment is configuring rsync on solaris 8. My solaris skills are untested at best. If anyone reading this can outline a quick and easy setup, please do comment.