“Massimo, look, this is my VDI”

Probably my shortest blog post ever.

I have lost track of what's happening in the EUC (End User Computing) space. Ironically I started this blog roughly 7 years ago with a post on virtual desktops (which is what I was working on at that time).

Thinking about it, that was my shortest blog post ever.

Not sure what happened. I probably got bored with all the "nice, but the Microsoft license to do it just costs too much" I heard.

And I decided to leave it behind.

Over the week-end I met with a good friend of mine working in the IT organization of a big insurance company. We ended up talking about his new gig there. That, interestingly, includes managing desktops.

While we talk about stateless computing, DaaS, design for fail, BYOD and, in general, cloud computing (whatever that means), I thought I would write this brief blog post as a reality check.

Note I have already done this in the past with the (in)famous Cloud and the Three IT Geographies post.

This is probably even better.

He, at some point, came out with "Massimo, look, this is our VDI". And he showed me this picture:

My very first reaction was "Wow! Where the fu on earth did you steal an Enigma machine?".

At a much closer look, this wasn't indeed the machine the Nazis used to encrypt their messages.

Instead, it goes like this.

When my friend's team get a request for "x" number of new desktops (new hires, new training class, whatever), someone unpack those desktops, remove the hard drives and plug them into the quasi-Enigma machine.

A master disk (with the official OS stack and surrounding software) is plugged into the master slot.

The quasi-Enigma machine then clones the master to all the 16 slave hard disk drives. He reported that the red and green leds are fascinating to watch while the copy goes on. But I am digressing.

I hope you find it interesting. If you are using any sort of PXE boot remote installation and you feel "old" (compared to what you read people are doing on twitter)… consider yourself blessed. In the real world, you have a great and leaning forward job!

Massimo.