To follow up from our chat last week, we want to move over VMware as our virtual machine client. This has numerous benefits over our current solution, virtual box.
VMware is the standard BBC virtualisation package, it is also available from the software catlogue. Most developers in the BBC will be familiar with VMware, so there will be little to no training required in order to start working.
VMware is a better supported piece of software, with faster updates, whereas virtualbox has known issues and can take time to resolve them. As such, we can be more reliant on VMware to better support the news sandbox and other virtual machines over time as we make changes and improvements.
Aside from the sandbox, other tools used in the BBC work best with VMware, these include the new load test tool SOASTA. This tool is a virtual machine that lives on a local machine, but there are networking issues with virtualbox that mean it requires a lot of maintenance.
Costs
https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion-professional/ £98.99 inc VAT PL
http://www.vagrantup.com/vmware £50 inc VAT PL
The main cost is the vagrant plugin, vagrant is a tool for packaging the news sandbox. This is £50 per license, with all regular staff requiring a copy. This would be around £1200 assuming contractors bought there own copies.
There would be also be a cost for those not using a BBC build laptop, this would be £98 per license for VMware and would be needed on around 8 machines adding £784 to the total.
Total costs would be around £1900-£2200 depending on how many developers need the plugin.
