Vices & Virtues of Virtualisation

One of the "challenges" of getting to Socitm Regional meetings is that often different regions meet on the same day! Today, I attended Socitm South's meeting, whose invitation I accepted some time ago, in Guildford, while Adrian represented the Board at Socitm East.

Nick Roberts, who was recently re-elected as Socitm South Chair introduced our meeting – "The Virtues and Vices of Virtualisation" – sponsored by IBM, whose Luke Shutler gave a lively first presentation on Desktop Virtualisation. Luke cited one of those facts that tend to stick in your mind… If a nanosecond was a second, data that took three seconds to retrieve from a processor would take fourteen days to retrieve from disc. (I'll take his word for it that is a fact.) Shepway District Council's Steve Makin gave an amusing and forthright presentation on server virtualisation, which amounted to "Just Do it!" Simon Jones presented on thin client exploitation in Hampshire (and the benefits of having moved from a mainframe environment straight to thin client). I was particularly interested in Hampshire's two-tier server architecture.

Janet De-Rochefort, Ian Cooper, Ken Boxhall and myself provided Socitm business updates then, after lunch, Civica's Alex Lemon presented "Virtually Licensed". He used to work in Microsoft's Audit Department and, in 284 engagements during his last year there, found that every single customer was both under and over licensed. The average licensing shortfall was £100k but, for some reason, they didn't bother to measure the over-licensing disparity! Alex provided a number of links to useful licensing resources, which will be on the Socitm website, with the rest of the day's proceedings, but it appears the most useful are:

http://ladylicensing.spaces.live.com/?_c11_BlogPart_BlogPart=blogview&_c=BlogPart&partqs=cat%3dVirtualisation

and…

https://roianalyst.alinean.com/microsoft/virtualization/