Microsoft Enables New Ways to Deploy Windows Vista
Q&A: New options to license desktop virtualization and diskless PCs give Windows Vista Enterprise customers more choices, says the director of Microsoft's Windows Business Group.
For many IT professionals within large organizations, maintaining control over their desktop environments is becoming an increasingly tall order. The cost of deploying and administering PCs – sometimes tens of thousands of PCs – across an enterprise can be significant, especially without the proper infrastructure in place to aid in the automation of these tasks. Add to that the growing complexity created by more mobile and temporary workers as well as new data security and compliance requirements – such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA in the United States – in regulated industries, and it is little wonder that some large enterprises are exploring alternative approaches to traditional desktop management.
With the combination of Window Vista Enterprise Edition and the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, customers can secure PCs, centralize applications and increase productivity while decreasing deployment costs. In addition, the advent of fast networking and virtualization has opened the door for large enterprises examining new architectures that centralize Windows. Last week, at the Microsoft Management Summit 2007 (MMS 2007), Microsoft detailed the upcoming availability of licensing for two new centralized architectures based on Windows Vista Enterprise Edition. For details on the new offerings and what they mean to customers, PressPass spoke with Microsoft’s Scott Woodgate, director in the Windows Business Group.
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| Scott Woodgate, Director, Microsoft Windows Business Group |
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PressPass: At MMS 2007, you disclosed additional deployment options for Windows Vista. What are these changes designed to address?
Woodgate: Some of our larger, more highly managed and heavily regulated customers have been asking us for more new Windows Vista deployment models and licensing so they can see how well nascent architectures based on virtualization and fast networking function within their environments. We are responding by adding two more options to the numerous ways customers can deploy and manage Windows Vista Enterprise. These two new options will enable our customers to begin testing centralized desktops and diskless PCs in their production environments alongside their existing deployment model and determine which combination provides the right mix of centralized IT control and end-user flexibility for their respective businesses.
PressPass: What exactly are the changes you announced?
Woodgate: For Software Assurance customers using Windows Vista Enterprise, we’re adding two new ways to license and deploy the operating system. They are:
1) The license right to use Windows Vista on diskless PCs
2) The availability of a subscription license called Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops (VECD) which allows customers to use Windows in virtual machines centralized on server hardware.
PressPass: What are diskless PCs? How do customers benefit from running Windows on a diskless PC, and how does it work?
Woodgate: We think of a diskless PC as simply a PC that runs Windows but does not store Windows or data locally because it does not have a hard drive. The customers that have been requesting diskless PCs tell us they want the ability to move their Windows data and applications to centralized storage hardware such as a Storage Area Network (SAN), while still maintaining the local computing characteristics and experience of a PC.
We are working with our partners so they can provide the software to enable diskless PCs and they will likely enable two different scenarios for customers. In the first scenario, each employee’s hard drive is stored individually on centralized storage hardware. In the second scenario, shared images are used by a group of users. Our licensing enables both of these scenarios so that customers can work with our partners to determine if these are valuable architectures within their desktop environment.
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Charles Aunger
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