KACE Product Support

Nope. The VM has the 250GB virtual disk limitation. They have not given an option for increasing VM storage... yet. It would only be possible now by resetting the root password (KBOX runs on FreeBSD) and increasing partition size - which I'd advise against since it definitely wouldn't be supported, and the application may be hard coded to utilizing 250GB anyway.

I agree this would be a nice option for the VM. Current benefits of VM:

• Other backup/restore options (e.g. VMware ESX backup, mirroring, etc.)
• Speed improvement (if you buy ridiculously fast hardware with multi-disk RAID10); FYI - I'll be posting benchmarking results for different disk setups for the VM soon (it's a blog I'm working on)
  
• No reliance on Dell KACE support for hardware troubleshooting (this could be positive or negative)
• VM license includes 3 VMs (unless they changed licensing since we bought ours) - so you can run a DR system and a Dev system for testing
• Improved hardware utilization statistical monitoring (if you use vSphere)

However, the VM host OS increases overhead. If you build a system with identical hardware specs to the K1000 and put ESX and a VM on it, it will run much slower. You need more CPU, RAM, and Disk I/O available in a VM environment.

Sales is correct- the limits are hard set right now (v5.3 K1000 and v3.3 K2000). Expanded storage is on the roadmap I believe, but not sure when. K2000 will likely get it first I'd imagine since it usually needs more.
Product Management folks at Kace can provide more detail than I can if it exists- ask your sales team to get you in touch with the right person[s].

Is there potential to streamline what patches your're downloading- like using labels to limit the downloads to only what you care about, or updating OSes to current service packs to unsubscribe from older SP's?

Product development seems to have slowed down significantly since the aquistion...[&:]

I have streamlined as much as possible, rather not have to babysit diskspace on a system - more important things to do.

Re: VM - Am I interpreting correctly that the min system requirements of VM results in a way slower system than the appliance?