Recently we had to deal with a rare request (or rare for where I work). We had a user who has a legitimate request for wanting linux on his desktop computer. The problem is for now we are a Windows XP desktop shop. Several systems staff have Linux or Mac’s but that is kind of unique since they are systems. The user in question wanted to try an odd flavor of linux as either a dual boot or a second desktop computer. This poses two issues for us. One, we have no security standard for end users to have linux. Secondly the flavor of linux he wanted to use was not what we currently use at all.
The solution for me seemed very obvious. Give the user VMware Player, and get them a pre-built Virtual Machine of Red Hat Enterprise Workstation (the linux desktop OS that we use internally). This way we don’t need to have a rouge desktop out there different than everything else we deploy to users. Also if there is a problem we can remove the VM and start from scratch quickly.
The user was not so keen on this idea since they wanted linux as their primary OS. We where solving an individual problem they had in the confines of our standards using VMware Player. So far things are working out just fine. The major issue I have is that the user is resourceful, and he may just go out to the VMNT site and download other pre-built VM’s that we have not authorized. I wonder if there is a way to limit what VM’s can run on a machines VMware Player?
Our long term intentions are to deploy all new desktop and laptop computers with the VMware Player already installed so if we need to do something like this again, we just send the user the VM and off they go. It is amazing how after a few years of using this software, we keep coming up with new ways of leveraging it in our organization. And since player is free, we didn’t even need to buy extra copies of VMware Workstation.
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