Virtual Machines: A really good use for them - Part 1
At my day job I oversee the operations of a 200 node network along with printers, faxes, switches, firewalls, servers, etc. It never fails. Every time a users machine goes South I always end up thinking about the same thing.
Wouldn’t it be great if that users system actually accessed a VM on a local server and that’s how they ran their apps, checked their e-mail, etc. So the system sitting at their desk was only used to view or connect to the VM on the server. There’s Citrix and Termianl Services but I’m only speaking about VMs here. Licensing wouldn’t be an issue I would think. The client system would be fine running a flavor of Linux. The license for Windows (XP/2000/etc) would be used for the VM itself.
So, when someone’s motherboard fails, or their drive goes out there’s no need to hit that panic switch. Their actual system is running on a server that gets backed up nightly. Users are notorious about not saving to the proper network drive. Instead they end up saving their documents on their local machine. When their system dies they’re in disbelief that they can no-longer get to those files. A remotely accessed VM would fix that pretty easily. They might still be saving to the local drive but that local drive is now on the VM - and backed up daily. 
That’s just a small (but lifesaving) example that I can think of off the top of my head. The only problem area that I can think of would be for mobile users. People who use laptops and are often times off-site. Of course, depending on the company and its user base that number might be fairly irrelevant.
To break up the load you could have VMs spread across multiple servers. Or you could have the VM actually run on the client side with just the VM files stored on a server. There’s different ways it could be approached.
I’ll continue this post later in a second part, once all this bad weather moves on - or else I’ll be wishing I used a remote VM! 