I hope you are joking. The teachers I know are compensated for the lower wages with the best health and retirement benefits around. I'd prefer to see the 80 student classroom as it might get teachers and politicians working together a little more to improve things, lest the politician lose his job.

LOL. Flame on.

Thanks for the personal attack, but I'm actually a VMware admin. Stop crying, grow a pair, and make a decision that best fits your business needs. You aren't using Windows, so go with something else like that Oracle offering, or pay VMware to keep up. Better yet, buy physical machines!

It sounds like you licensed the wrong edition for your cluster. Although it pains me to say it, for that kind of density and the decreased feature set that you are used to, you might consider switching to Hyper-V. The density you claim probably means Windows Server Datacenter or Hyper-V Server is more cost effective per CPU anyways. Call your VMware rep and tell them how pissed you are.

Then I'm pleased to inform you that with VMware vSphere Enterprise, you'd have a total vRAM entitlement of 128 GB per physical host at those specs. Enterprise Plus is a 96 GB per CPU entitlement. If you've allocated more than 96 GB per CPU to virtual machines I'm going to venture a guess that you've overallocated the memory or your density is way too high, but maybe you just have unique requirements. I have been fine scaling out with dual Intel quad-cores and 48-64 GB each host with the virtual machines allocated below that amount. Also, the entitlement is pooled across the cluster.

They adjusted the vRAM entitlements after the initial reaction to the change in licensing. Fact is, most customers will not be affected, a some that are can just dial back the allocations which not only gets them within the entitlement, but also reduces overhead. How many users of vSphere really set the vRAM on a virtual machine to the minimum required amount to get the job done?

You, sir, need a new foil hat.

It is subsidized because it has been determined to be beneficial to society as a whole, just like phone service and education. Also, this is probably the largest factor holding us back from a paperless society.

This is a wrong, but very common perspective. If you want someone to blame, look at congress. Look at the US Supreme Court. Look at the patent process. The leaders of corporations are just trying to make money for themselves and shareholders and provide long term viability in the market. Politicians, on the other hand, are to blame for the law of the land which prevents innovation and economic growth. Granted, corporate lobbyists have some blame, but it was the government officials that actually passed the laws. Exercise your right to vote, people.

When I learned SharePoint, I used a dedicated low-end PC with Linux and VMware Server. I installed a second hard drive to dedicate to the virtual machines. It took some time to boot the environments, but it worked. If I were to do it today, I'd go with a better desktop, load up on memory and use multiple hard drives in whatever RAID configuration made sense. This can scale out to multiple desktops, NAS, managed switches, etc. I'd probably use VMware Hypervisor instead of Server as well. Boot it off a USB flash drive or SD card if you want. Consider power, cooling, noise, and space in your hardware selection.

I am of the opinion that many federal departments are formed to manipulate state functions through legal wrangling and finance, like threatening to pull funding of highways if the state doesn't prohibit alcohol to people under the age of 21. While I agree with that example in principal, it was a shady way to implement it. I'm now a big fan of small federal government, and large state.

How is this naive? On the one hand you reference where the FDA and the Justice Department along with a whistleblower put a stop to faulty processes in a GSK plant in Puerto Rico. On the other reference, clear evidence is shown of the dangers of prescription drug counterfeiting. Both support that the FDA protects the patient from significant harm.

Most of that is either a function of the state and local governments or privatized.

Counterfeit drugs are quite often fake in that they contain more, less, or an entirely different drug than advertised. They have also been known to contain toxic filler material and not practice proper sanitation in manufacturing. Have fun fighting big pharma and taking those cheap foreign drugs. I'd rather pay up and be assured I'm getting the correct medicine from a well regulated facility.

I'm MikeB0Lton too. We should have beers and stuff.