Matthew Buck’s Blog – Principal Engineer at RatwareUK

If I could have a pound for every time I’m meeting a new client and they ask “Can we have a wireless network, instead of a wired one?” we’d be a) rich and b) doing a serious mis-service. If everyone was as familiar with the words “virtualisation” as they are with “wireless” we’d be very happy. I guess it’s because people have wireless networking thrown at them by TV adds, ISPs and their savvy, computer-addict children. Why can’t people request virtualisation?

Today RatwareUK decided that, unless there was a specific technical circumstance against it, virtualisation was from now on, going to be the preferred solution we push to SMEs. VMware, memory and processing power have come a long way since I used to run Linux through a VM window on my home PC almost a decade ago. Now VMware is a credible and widespread solution, providing a multi-server deployment on minimal hardware and revolutionising IT support, security and provisioning. Within an SME context it consolidates everything and gets rid of the need for complex restoration processes and the constant up-hill support battle present on a multi-OS client environment. Virtualisation kills the need for complex group policy work, scripting and client upgrading. It pools your resources and configuration into one place.

I’m unsure what’s next for virtualisation. Maybe transferring your virtual machine solution from your office, to your hosting company’s cloud?

IT professionals have simply ignored Vista. Windows 7 could now change everything.

I was thinking the other day about Windows 7.  It was only released in the back end of October, however, with Vista being such a flop, it dawned on me that Windows 7 will, by virtue, be the biggest change in business user experience since 2001. That’s almost a decade. You may dismiss this and believe that Vista bridges the gap between XP and Windows 7 and this isn’t really big news, but it doesn’t and it is big news.

Think about it. Although new domestic PC sales have pushed Vista as the “number one” OS and ditched XP, most business IT professionals have refused to deploy Vista. An ideology so stubborn that it has caused Dell Commercial to continue selling XP Professional, alongside Vista to this day. In the history of Microsoft, this has never happened before. Also, the statistics for operating system market share state that XP peaked at 76.1% in 2007. That’s 76.1 percent of the world’s computers running Windows XP. In 2008 this market share is said to have grown to over 80%. This is telling, especially considering it’s two years into Vista’s release, and I bet this percentage is even greater when you consider just commercial networks on their own.

I was chatting with my colleague and we recall commissioning just one Vista machine since its release in 2006. And guess what? This was by accident! (We messed up the order with Dell). Adding insult to injury, we refused to join it to the domain and booted it straight into a terminal server window, providing a 2003 style user-experience. XP is just so much nicer for the “domain experience”.

So although you may have been using Vista at home for some time, don’t forget that at work your PC is more than likely XP Professional. And, as first reviews of Windows 7 are extremely positive and the door has finally closed on the Vista debacle. Techies all over the world are lifting their noses out of their Cisco manuals and evangelizing Windows 7. As XP completely bypassed Vista in the commercial world. A huge change is definitely upon us.