“I call it the desktop dilemma, VMware’s CEO, Paul Maritz says. “On the one hand, IT organisations see the need to bring down costs, and they know what the right thing to do is. They have used virtualisation very effectively to reduce server proliferation and server costs. They know that increased centralisation and a standard infrastructure will help them get a handle on the cost of desktop and client provisioning in the same way. But the dilemma is whether they standardise on thick or thin client, on Windows or Mac, on fixed or mobile devices.”
There’s another side to the problem, he adds. “On the other hand, users are no longer prepared to be held hostage to any single device.”
Users want to be able to sit down wherever they are, log on and get at their work files, Maritz continues, “To do that, we have to start delivering a desktop environment which belongs to an individual and not to a device.”
He maintains the best solution to these problems builds directly off what his company has being doing with its VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure software.
Desktop virtualisation is hot and set to get even hotter through 2009-2010. Gartner has suggested spending on desktop virtualisation across the board could be over 300% up on spending in 2008, compared to IT spending as whole being down around 4%.
Leveraging cloud computing
As we went to press, IBM was gearing up to make a series of announcements in the desktop virtualisation space. It says its customers have already seen success with leveraging cloud computing to virtualise desktops. Using up to 73% less power than traditional desktops and laptops, servers can more efficiently manage this work and deliver a better end-user experience. Based on IBM internal data from client engagements, virtualized desktops can also lower end-user IT support costs by up to 40% over a traditional environment.
IBM will announce two deployment options to help clients virtualise desktops:
– IBM Smart Business Desktop Cloud – Cloud services delivered via the client’s own infrastructure and data centre
– IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud – IBM Smart Business Virtual Desktop is delivered via IBM’s secure, scalable public cloud
IBM says its clients have already seen success with this model. Pike County Schools System in Eastern Kentucky has 10,000 students in 27 schools, and 3,000 employees. Like many organizations today, their budget is decreasing while the need for increased access to technology is rising. The school’s 10 or 12 -year-old computers now behave as if they were top-of-the line 2009 models because the desktop is only an access point to the private cloud.
Providing cost-effective technology solutions is an ongoing challenge for today’s K-12 schools, said Maritta Horne, CIO of Pike County School District in Eastern Kentucky. With IBM Smart Business Virtual Desktop, more than 10,000 students in Pike County are able to easily and quickly access new courseware through private cloud desktops, and the school system is saving on expenses related to hardware updates, technology support staff and power usage.
As a result, Pike County has achieved a reduction of over 62% of end-user support costs while providing equal access to education content across 27 schools and just over 2,000 desktops. The introduction of new courseware – what used to take over a year – can now be implemented instantly across all schools.
Big implications
The desktop virtualisation model has big implications for the industry and for business. “We are moving fundamentally away from a device-centric world into one that is application, information, and user-centric” VMware’s Maritz contests, explaining why he expects virtual desktop infrastructure offerings to hit the spot.
The hope is that vClient and VMware View, latest entrants into the VMware portfolio, could spark a level of interest in desktop virtualisation among businesses, just as the vendor’s hugely successful server and storage virtualisation products have before.
The vClient initiative includes several desktop virtualisation technologies that will debut in 2009 for client virtualisation, offline desktop and image management (known as View Composer). VMware View Composer enables IT to create thousands of virtual desktop environments rapidly from a master image and update these images by simply updating the master. The aim is to let IT shops set up virtual desktops in the data centre while giving end users a single view of all their applications and data in a familiar, personalised environment on any device at any location.
So far user adoption of this sort of desktop virtualisation has failed to pass the early-adopter phase. It may be a case of slowly, slowly; but things are changing fast and in the next two years the industry will move steadily towards a desktop environment that will be virtualised.
Gartner confirms that although alternative client architectures have been available for more than five years now, the adoption of application virtualisation, application streaming, hosted desktops and PC blades is only just emerging. One big draw, and a critical aspect to delivering a virtualised desktop, is the fact that no data needs to be held on the PC itself: the promise of a secure endpoint, at long last.
Enterprise security is the big issue and virtualised desktops offer a neat solution. This has been the case for one UK police force. After an internal work study identified that police officers could need access to as many as 70 separate internal IT systems while out on patrol, Leicestershire Constabulary decided on a virtualised desktop environment as a good means of providing mobile access to data.
Panasonic ToughBook laptops with onboard 3G wireless network cards are served by Citrix XenDesktop. “The ability of XenDesktop to deliver virtualised desktops meant officers work with the same core systems they were familiar with back in the office,” explains James Pearce of Leicestershire Constabulary. “The only difference was that the computer is in the car,” the man behind the deployment says.
The system assembles virtual desktops on-demand and has been tested to ensure it is capable of providing a consistent performance over GPRS to the 300 or so units that will eventually be deployed. Carried out in conjunction with the National Police Improvement Agency, the scheme could well domino across other police forces. Because much of the information stored in the police database includes crime or offender details and is extremely sensitive, the use of Citrix XenDesktop to centralise that information on a secure server, centrally managed behind the firewall, removes any threat of data leakage.
Happy coexistence
Gartner stresses that desktop virtualisation will coexist with, rather than replace, PCs and server-based computing and though the analyst house predicts the market will triple in size this year, the segment will drive no more than $300m in software sales.
Key to the value proposition is the use of virtualised, centralised components of an organisation’s infrastructure to deliver a distributed computing experience. Some of the technology has been around for a number of years, with the likes of Citrix, Softricity (acquired by Microsoft) and Altiris (bought by Symantec) pioneering different approaches to that reaching goal.
Application and desktop virtualisation go hand-in-hand, Citrix’s CEO Mark Templeton argues. “In fact, the success of a desktop virtualisation strategy relies not only on the separation of the desktop OS from the hardware, but also the application from the desktop operating system. Without application virtualisation, a virtual desktop implementation will suffer from many of the issues of a traditional distributed one, the biggest issues being image management, image storage and user profile management.”
A virtual desktop platform must, Templeton insists, provide the ability to virtualise both the desktop OS and the applications that will be delivered to it, either by data centre hosting or by streaming for client-side execution.
Templeton picks out one other requirement that is critical to the success of desktop virtualisation and therefore market growth. “User acceptance primarily depends on the delivery of a high-definition user experience and a platform that delivers flexible usage scenarios. Citrix has made announcements and updates to the XenDesktop platform in both of these areas with HDX technologies (high definition display delivery) and Project Independence, client side virtualisation for offline and mobile usage.”
The Citrix CEO insists that the driver for the desktop virtualisation market is the overwhelming need for businesses to reduce their desktop infrastructure overheads, especially in the current global downturn, because they simply cannot continue down the same road.
Russ Artz, vice chairman and founder at CA, accepts that desktop virtualisation is on its way, but considers there are some market and technology issues still to be dealt with before it can take off.
“It’s coming for sure, but I question if a company like Citrix has the market clout to drive its adoption. Microsoft needs to take the lead and from that standpoint, I don’t see any momentum developing in this area for a couple of years or more,” he says.
Slow off the mark
Microsoft has done little to promote the Softgrid application virtualisation platform it bought over three years ago. At the time Microsoft described the takeover as a strategic acquisition, which effectively validated the area of desktop application virtualisation and streaming. The Softgrid system, now known as App-V, turns Windows applications into centrally managed virtual services. These can be delivered to a desktop in a container or virtualised image that does not interfere with or require interaction with the base operating system.
Likewise, Symantec has been slow off the mark after buying Altiris in 2007, but is making a play with virtualised user workspaces pushed from its Endpoint Virtualisation Suite and delivered to a PC in a VMware virtual machine.
“When desktop virtualisation does arrive,” Artzt continues, “it will change the game. It will impact on how we address IT systems management. The management of assets, the management of security and governance will all be affected.”
It is also said that network latency becomes an issue for end users when response times go beyond 150 to 200 milliseconds. Most networks can cope with the bandwidth hit of running Microsoft Terminal Server Edition’s RDP native protocol or Citrix’s Independent Computing Architecture, but those same networks may well run tired when delivering media-rich applications, or a well loaded virtual desktop that’s been set out for an off-site knowledge worker.
Vendors are working on this one. VMware is collaborating with Teradici to develop PC-over-IP virtualisation software that can handle a true PC experience with high resolution graphics and rich multimedia, including streaming movies and high-definition audio. “Our whole reason for being is to solve the problems of delivering desktops over IP networks. It’s all we do,” explains Stuart Robinson of Teradici, “so we think have a pretty unique perspective on the issue.”
The company started out building its PC-over-IP protocol into silicon for use in high-end 3D graphics and CAD workstations. IBM has since deployed the technology into its BladeCenter line and the blade PC pioneer of ClearCube also used it.
“Currently we are modifying the implementation of our protocol so that we can provide VMware with a software version of PCoIP so it can implement it in its own software” Robinson says. “We have implemented it in add-in cards, in USP peripherals, in daughter boards for blades and on little bricks that go into graphic display units. But a primary target has become the desktop. Our primary goal now is to hit the mainstream with a software version for desktop virtualisation.”
Robinson nicely sums up the current market position. “The assumption is that we are all going to be virtualising the desktop, just as we have done with storage and with servers. The big question is, what technology to use.” As the desktop virtualisation market is still in its infancy, users would be wise to ask for proof of concepts before leaping in. But with interest in cutting costs from the IT infrastructure growing, desktop virtualisation should be the next major frontier after server and storage virtualisation projects are under way.
Don’t miss! A CBR podcast in which editor Jason Stamper talks to Chris De Vere, IBM x86 Modular Systems, about the rise of virtual desktop solutions, whether or not the business case stacks up, and why customers should consider IBM in this market segment. http://tinyurl.com/lkm838
