Microsoft Systems Manager SoftGrid 4

in Microsoft on Softgrid

Now that Microsoft intends to expand their virtualisation strategy with the purchase of Softricity, I expect that we will see a few things with SoftGrid:

  1. SMS will be the primary deployment and management tool. I presume the existing SoftGrid Server will be no more and SMS will be the only server component for SoftGrid;
  2. No support for Oracle as the database. Whilst support for Oracle was never really there, Softricity did have intent on support at some stage. With SMS managing SoftGrid, Oracle will never be the back-end;
  3. Active Directory will be a requirement. Will we see support for LDAP discontinued?

It would also be great to see the SoftGrid client component come as a part of the operating system or as a free download. Management would then require SMS, of course. Providing the client free with the OS would help us address application issues greatly. Altiris and Citrix may have some issues with this however.

(* I’m taking a wild guess at product names here)