I mentioned in an earlier post about how Quickbooks ties many accountants to Windows.  Well I’ve found a partial yet money-saving workaround.  We leverage virtualization even more but not in the typical way.  Instead of setting up a NAS/DAS/SAN you run it off local stoarge.  For SMB’s this saves on costs both short and long run.  Allow me to explain:

First you need to figure out exactly how many of your employees actually do work inside of Quickbooks at the same time.  Not on the same files at the same time but how many of them actually are actively using Quickbooks at the same time.  I bet it’s not even half of your employees.  For the sake of math let’s say you have 15 employees.  Here’s what you do next:

You buy a new virtualization host server.  You then fire up only that amount of windows virtual machines on that server.   Once that is done you then convert all machines to Linux.  Providing printing is solved(which it can be) you only need to pay for 7 windows licenses and 7 Quickbooks licenses.  Considering Linux is free your software costs hit the floor and then burrow underneath it..:)  Now instead of constantly replacing hardware to put up with QB and windows bloat you just let them sit on the virtual machines.  Your hardware lasts longer due to not needing to be replaced every 3-5 years for the latest windows environment cycle and you buy much less software.  of course if your cloudy apps hammer your cpu that’s where individual cpu (maybe motherbaords too)upgrades come into play(aka whiteboxes anyone?).  I’m not going to go into specifics on how i would build my vm host for this..if you want to know contact me for a discussion and quote.