_Leopard on ESX Would Be Nice : Bob Plankers, The Lone Sysadmin:
“Instead, I’d really like to run Mac OS X in ESX Server. I don’t even care if I have to buy Apple Xserve hardware to do it. I’d love to see Mac OS X guests in VirtualCenter, able to use VMotion, snapshots, HA, cloning, and all the enterprise features we already have for Windows, Linux, Netware, and Solaris x86. It would also be very cool to see Mac OS X virtual desktops. Imagine how easy it would be to switch people over then.”
(Via The Lone Sysadmin.)_
It would seem that I’m not alone in dreaming of Leopard on ESX.
To add some further fuel to the fire, I noticed some additional details on the original TidBITS article that pointed out the change to the OS X Server EULA:
So even though Xserve buyers currently need to buy more Xserves than they would if virtualization was available, the lack of virtualization is driving some customers to other server hardware. Plus, with virtualization, if Apple sells two additional ten-client copies of Mac OS X Server for $499 each, the profit on that software is nearly identical to the estimated $1,000 profit of a stock $2,999 Xserve (using Apple’s latest 33.6 percent gross margin for the Xserve profit estimate). Additionally, without virtualization, some groups might be tempted to rely on multiple cheap Mac minis rather than an Xserve that could run multiple virtual machines.
Apple’s profit model with OS X Server is entirely different from that of the regular user version. If you take the 33.6 percent gross margin as a given (which I find relatively optimistic) then Apple retains the same profit for a direct software sale of an unlimited licence of OS X Server without incurring all of the overhead associated with actually producing the machine.
If Apple is seriously thinking about upping the ante in the guerilla approach to moving OS X into the enterprise, offering a version of OS X Server that runs on ESX makes an awful lot of sense. It’s just a software purchase which is a lot easier to push through than any kind of non-standard hardware. Parallels Server as a virtualisation platform is an interesting option since it runs on Xserves, but it’s got a long way to go before it can offer the flexibility and reliability of ESX. It’s positioned for shops that already have a well developed Apple population rather than mainstream x86 datacenters.
Combined with the upcoming Snow Leopard Exchange compatibility and second generation collaboration tools, it would be the perfect information sharing appliance for unstructured data that could be integrated seamlessly into an Active Directory managed environment.
I think that the key issue for Apple is deciding how can they publish a virtualised version of OS X Server without permitting the same technology to be used for the client version as that could have a potentially negative effect on sales of notebooks and desktops into the enterprise. But as long as it’s not officially supported it will remain the domain of hobbyist geeks and not a threat to their core business. On that front one mustn’t underestimate the potential positive side-effects of OS piracy with regards to market share.
The problem of diminishing desktop sales into enterprises is one shared by all hardware vendors with the advent of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions coming onto the market. Maybe the hidden killer application for Apple in the enterprise is an Apple branded thin client that ties to a VDI backend solution and they licence the client OS on a virtualised per-instance basis. Although this would require that Apple do a lot of work on the current VNC based screen sharing technology. Using this approach enterprises could dabble with OS X deployments without changing anything in their infrastructure, which would lead to additional laptop sales for those people that really need computing horsepower while on the move as affordable, high-speed, low latency, universal network access remains a ways off yet.
OK - I’m getting off my hobby horse now…