Six Vistas: an IT nightmare?

Microsoft has detailed how its forthcoming Vista OS will appear, and the six-pronged view is raising the concern of enterprise IT managers. When it is released later this year, Vista will have six core editions: four aimed at consumers and two designed for the enterprise.

In fact, the total number of Vista editions may ratchet up to eight or more, after European Union-specific versions of the OS, minus Windows Media Player 11, are counted.

How do IT admins feel about winding their way through potentially eight different versions of Windows Vista?

“It’s ridiculous,” said Steven Enright, senior network manager at Glenwood Management, a large New York City luxury residential property manager. By splitting its OSes into multiple SKUs, Microsoft has potentially added significant extra work for already overloaded system administrators.

Whether the final tally reaches six or eight, or if you focus only on the two enterprise Vista versions, Vista Business and Windows Enterprise, the headache to IT administrators is still considerable.

“Patch testing is going to be a nightmare,” Enright said. Companies such as his manage OSes as images, usually customized for specific departments. “Now you’ve got multiple versions of Windows, multiple versions of Office, and any number of third-party applications,” he says. “You’re going to have to pretest all Microsoft patches against all these permutations. They’ve maybe tripled the work involved.”

And that’s only considering two business Vistas. Add in telecommuters and you could wind up supporting at least one of the two home-oriented Vistas as well; especially Windows Vista Ultimate, which is the power-user version that contains every sexy feature from all the other versions.

“It makes me want to take a much closer look at Linux on the desktop,” said Paul Lindo, CIO of FB2, a New York-based network consultancy. “For large enterprises, not only do [multiple Vista versions] add significant hours to the IT job, it almost guarantees you’ll wind up supporting more than one Windows version because enterprises generally make those buying decisions on a departmental basis.”

“I wish I could look at Linux,” countered Enright, but he feels his company is too entrenched in Microsoft to make such a move feasible. He’s quick to want to try, however, after being told that Windows Enterprise will be available only as part of the Software Assurance licensing program. “That’s like insult to injury.”

“If Novell has brains, they’ll market the heck out of Novell Linux Desktop right now, because this is a great play for them,” Lindo said.

And he’s right, especially for SMBs that can’t deal with all the options, the Software Assurance upgrade pressure, or the consulting expenses. But simplicity in product packaging and distribution apparently isn’t much of a consideration in Redmond.