Sys Admin opinion on supporting non BAU teams?

[thenewoc]

Just wondered if there are any sys admins here that would share their opinion on managing non business as usual teams such as devs working on a project that require specific applications that are not supported within the usual BAU apps?

What is the best practice?

Is it to allow local admin rights on specific PC's or would you instead advocate using a separate VM that's been configured with a Windows OS and necessary dev applications, then allow their BAU PC to connect to a server hosting the Hyper-V VM?

 

[thenewoc]

Windows virtual desktop, or a local hyper v instance on W10 which will traverses the corporate net but has the relevant controls in place whilst still allowing them to do dev work.

What kind of Dev talk are we dealing with here as most is now all cloud based, including Visual Code, GIT, ADO, etc meaning applications on the desktop are few and far between.

Thanks for the reply.

So your saying you might run a Hyper-V instance on the local machine rather than it being hosted in your DC? I'm assuming it could also instead be hosted on a Windows server but am not familiar with Windows server management. The dev work is around data management, extract, transform and possibly load or output to file storage for manual loading. These applications are generally desktop applications, Java ones to be more precise with a couple of the main choices such as Talend or Pentaho (open source equivalents of SSIS although they also have Enterprise Editions too), where these have to be unzipped to the system drive and system environment variables have to be set for JRE & JDK paths. Also ability to query data through standard executables such as MySQL Workbench, DBeaver, MS SQL Server Management Studio depending on requirements for client's project but all run locally otherwise you'd fall foul of large amounts of ingress & egress to/from a cloud service.

Having the Hyper-V running in the DC would put the OS requirements potentially in the same place that the data is either stored (possibly existing SQL server of some sorts, either direct backend to legacy or a replication database server) or would be received if using text file extracts as is sometimes the case with some legacy system vendors.

Does that sound feasible?

Presumably a small change may be required on the developers BAU desktop or laptop so they could connect to the Hyper-V VM. Would you deploy a separate VM per developer or would you just deploy one and set up multiple user accounts on it since it would be a W10 OS?

@smogsy thanks too, the idea of having the VM was really to circumvent so much red tape in needing anyone to have local admin rights as usually that ends up with people installing all sorts and in all sorts of ways. If the Hyper-V solution being served from a clients DC was possible then even that wouldn't require admin rights once the image was configured.

 

[thenewoc]

Thanks, I didn't realise Hyper-V was available as a free standalone product so will look into the possibility of a cluster of those and whether this is limited to just two nodes.