Whoah! This one slipped by my radar, but contains a very interesting tidbit that will join my two competing passions: Apple and Virtualization.
The article from virtualization.infohas a list of leaked features from the next major release of vSphere (number 5 for those of you counting).
When the article first crossed my RSS feed, I didn’t read all the way to the bottom, figuring that I’d wait for the beta program to start and then really dig in my teeth since I’m already good and busy with vSphere 4.1.
But one little line would have jumped out at me if I’d paid attention: support for Snow Leopard Server (SLS). This has been on my wish list for quite a while now since it will allow me to deploy virtual instances of the SLS. Technically, this doesn’t present much of a challenge as there are a number of hacks that let you do this right now. But the kicker will be support from Apple and VMware as this certainly wouldn’t be announced without the approval from Apple.
All of the sudden I can run a CAL-free server with lots of really nice features, not the least of which are excellent support for iOS clients with the integrated calendaring, wiki, blog, podcasting etc., that can also leverage my existing Active Directory environment.
And of course as a VM I’ll be able to profit from all of the advantages of vSphere. Up until now, there hasn’t been a single feature in vSphere 5 that has been sufficiently compelling to make me look forward to the new version (1Tb of RAM and 32 vCPUS ? Cool, but way outside of the scope of my projects).
Now I’m champing at the bit…
Not to mention imagining a few interesting things about the eventual support for Lion. One of the things that I’ve seen is that the remote screen sharing is no longer a direct attach to the physical screen à la classic VNC, but a session by session screen instance à la Terminal Server.
Can you say OS X VDI?
Things that make you go hmmmmm.