[ale] advice needed.

[Joshua Kite]

I think we're missing part of the story here.  What differentiates the 1000
user versus the 20 user solution?  That is, does your marketing organization
believe that it is not possible to sell a small company on the effort of
implementing a Linux server and solution due to cost/support/etc?

One somewhat legitimate obstacle to selling a Linux-based solution is that
smaller organizations may not be able to justify the cost of having a Linux
sysadmin when they already have a windows admin.  If that is the challenge
with the smaller companies, then the VM solution is compounding the problem
and not solving it, because your customer must now have a windows admin who
can become familiar with Linux and also VMWare or similar software.

Virtual machines have advanced in the past several years, but running a
separate OS and software in a VM does have some impact on performance.

On the flip side, creating a VM shouldn't be that difficult.  It could make
implementation somewhat simpler, as it might make things a bit more "cookie
cutter."  And using a VM might save a company the cost of purchasing a
server that they might not otherwise buy.  I haven't used VMWare's
snapshots, but it does seem like those would provide a nice backup solution.

Good luck,

Josh Kite

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Atlanta Geek <atlantageek at gmail.com> wrote:

> We have a web application that we sell to corporations for 1000 users.
> Marketing has come back and asked for a 20 user solution. We tried
> suggesting the SAAS approach but for accounting purposes this may be
> more difficult for customers to agree too.
>
> So the only other option is to do this as a vmware image that will run
> on a windows platform. (The virtual machine would still be a linux
> machine.)
>
> I don't have a lot of experience with this. Does this sound
> reasonable.  Im thinking that this may be great for simplifying
> backups and that sort of thing. Is this reasonable for A windows user
> to run a virtual machine on his PC?
>
>
> --
> http://www.atlantageek.com
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>
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