Rolls Royce is legendary. When you talk to someone about a luxury vehicle, forget about the electronic gadget loaded Honda or the spacious yet bulky Jeep. Even Mercedes doesn’t quite cut the class because I’ve heard the people living in the slums of India are able to afford one these days. The ultimate thrill of owning a Rolls is simply being able to say to a group of snobby high class people is “I own a Rolls” and that pretty much kills the competition. Let’s face it. You don’t exactly get V12 engines which make practically no sounds when started in every car these days. Most cars start off with the wheezing sounds and then gasp for life. Rolls starts with a whisper and you could be standing in a really quiet street and still not know when a Rolls breezes past – it’s simply brilliantly quiet. And we’ve all heard the stories about people having had the pleasure of owning a Rolls. According to the rumors, you’re never really the owner of a Rolls. Technically, you’re leasing a very expensive brand label and being given the privilege to sit in a car that has been crafted painstakingly by hand. Forget about complaining about the fuel. If you can afford the car, you can afford to pay for the fuel that goes into the 6.75L engine. The boys and girls at Rolls keep in touch with all their customers not out of sheer concern for the customer but more for the sake of knowing how their creation is doing and being kept. They actually want to know if the vehicle makes any creaking sounds and they do want to fix any creaks lest it becomes a major creak in their branding later on. You don’t find Rolls owners going around telling people that they have a Rolls but it creaks for some reason – it simply doesn’t happen because the dedication put into the car is a clear indicator that Rolls doesn’t simply hire people. They hire Rolls enthusiasts with the spirit for perfection in everything they do. That probably explains why the car is hand painted as well and the finishing lines alone taking a few hours per stroke.

I suppose the thing about the Rolls is the drivetrain. It is truly one of the most marvelous pieces of equipment that man could make to perfection. The fact that each gear is hand fitted and tested for any sounds makes it more impressive because you don’t get that with other luxury vehicles and if the gear doesn’t mesh or play well with the other gears, its chucked aside and another one is brought in to make it work. Sheer perfection. I think if someone spends so much time and energy into getting the gears right, they are probably very serious about their job. And it is this dedication for detail that makes the Rolls a class on its own. You don’t get Honda fiddling around with their vehicles drivetrain’s because all of these vehicles are built on the factory line with little or no human intervention required. And then there’s the hand stitched leather and handmade wood grain finish which requires quite a bit of experience to match. So really in the end, you’re not exactly buying a car – you’re buying a piece of art and that is definitely a piece you can be proud of because you had a say in every piece of luxury that went into the car. From the paint right down to the little tables inside, you get to choose what you want and how you want it and the Roll’s team will be more than happy to accommodate your request although I don’t think you’re going to have much luck convincing them to put under carriage neon lights and a hotdog muffler. So then it should come as no surprise to you that in the spirit of modernization, Roll’s has decided to go with the times and have made a colossal blunder which is likely to cause them to not only raise a few eyebrows but also cost Roll’s customers in the future.

It all started with the drivetrain. Someone in Roll’s came in one day and told everyone that he wanted to change the drivetrain from its current design to the electronic drivetrain. Needless to say there must have been a quiet silence when this announcement was made because no one ever expected the Rolls to go in this direction. Nonetheless Roll’s decided to put it to the test and has setup a website where people can go to discuss and bash out whether Roll’s should go for the electronic drivetrain or stick to its original design which is probably the way to go I reckon since the Roll’s doesn’t deserve to be degraded to this level. It should remain the vehicle which is built by hand and that includes the drivetrain because if you’re going to drop the quality of the drivetrain to an electronic chip, you may as well close down Goodwood and throw the whole Roll’s into a factory which has lots of robots that will do all the work for you and send the workers home while you’re at it. If this decision is all about costs, then it still doesn’t make sense because the Roll’s is for the true driving enthusiast who understands cars and doesn’t look at money when making a purchase. The same principle applies to terminal based services such as those provided by Citrix and VMware.

When Citrix initially came out with its thin client services and promised the world a revolutionary new product which would slash costs, the BT world responded eagerly because the costs of maintaining each machine was becoming a burden for organizations with over 1000 employees. It was also expensive to purchase licenses for each machine which meant that a large chunk of the organizations revenue went towards costs that could be contained if a workable centralized solution was available. The existing centralized solutions or dumb terminals were woefully useless and Citrix promised to change that. I’ve used Citrix and no doubt its good. Their current release of the XenApp brings the power of desktop computing into a thin client terminal and users get the same experience as a normal user. Nonetheless the structure and cost of setting up a Citrix environment is expensive and if it’s not setup correctly, you have a huge problem on your hands. When I was working for an enterprise some time back, we had a major problem with our Citrix mainframe which resulted in users not being able to connect to the server once the user threshold crossed 250 connections. This meant that anyone trying to log into the system after the user count exceeded 250, they would either have to wait some time until the server allowed another connection or they wouldn’t be able to connect at all. At one point someone even went to the extent of rebooting the servers in the hope of killing off the load but somehow the wrong server got rebooted and that became a whole new story. In the end, the lesson I’ve learned is that while Citrix is an amazingly good terminal service provider, it needs to work on its licensing a little more and is geared towards enterprise level organizations. For SME’s, Citrix is not the solution because of the associated costs. Instead, there is something even more revolutionary that builds on what Citrix does but has the ability to function in almost any mainframe end which can be anything from as small as a laptop to a server farm.

The newest player is VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI. This is a VMware solution, not a product because it involves using Virtualization to provide virtual desktops to your users. All of us are familiar with the concept of using VMware Server or VMware ESX to virtualize your server applications (like SQL server, print servers, or other dedicated servers). VDI takes this a step farther.

Here are the steps to using VDI:

  • Create a virtual machine on ESX Server
  • Install a VDI Connection Broker – this Connection Broker is what determines which Remote Desktop
  • Host a user is assigned or should be connected to
  • Install a desktop operating system on that VM, such as Windows XP or Windows Vista
  • Install desktop applications on the VM
  • Allow remote access to that virtual desktop system over the network using any number of possible remote control options

VDI could be compared, in a number of ways, to thin-client computing (such as Citrix/Terminal Services). With VDI, you are taking the processing off of the end user’s device and bringing it onto a server. The difference with VDI, unlike thin-client, the virtual desktop is dedicated to a single end user or mapped to provide the desktop OS & applications to a single client viewing device.

The VMware VDI packaged solution, of course, uses VMware ESX as the underlying virtualization product. However, if you are creating your own less-featured version of VDI, you could do the same thing with VMware Server, if you are willing to sacrifice the VMware ESX features & connection broker features, in return for getting this type of solution for next to nothing.

VDI could be compared, in Here are the benefits to VDI:

  • Security – Desktops are more secure
  • Rollback – Can use VMware’s snapshot and revert technology on desktop machines
  • Centralized Apps – Applications upgrades are easier because systems are all in a centralized location
  • Speed Deployment – you can quickly clone existing machines and roll out new systems because machines are all in a single central repository
  • Provide a full desktop PC – Unlike Terminal Services or Citrix, with VDI, you are providing full access to a Virtual machine and each virtual desktop is mapped to a single user or a single client device.
  • Reliability – if you could quickly restore any PC OS to a useable state, free from viruses or corruption, how reliable could your desktop systems be?

There are some of you may see the benefits of VMware’s packaged VDI and be willing to pay the price for the hardware, VMware Virtual Infrastructure software (like ESX), connection broker, and the VMware services to implement their VDI package. Perhaps you will virtualize every desktop and move them onto the Virtual datacenter. If so, good for you. The VMware VDI solution with a connection broker is an excellent solution.

I strongly recommend you give VDI a whirl – its available for demo through Datec Fiji Ltd. and is quite an impressive solution if you’re serious about containing your BT costs. Have a great week!!!

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