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Desktops in a virtual world

31 October 2008

Steve Brown, ICT business expert

Have you ever had the fear that if you lost your laptop (either physically or technically) that it would probably be the worst day of your career? Good planning and practices, such as back-ups and storage, will probably recover the data but what about the inconvenience of downtime and loss of productivity while you await the replacement to be delivered and configured. Then there are the security issues to be considered; how many laptops inadvertently ‘left in the back of a taxi’ have made news headlines because of their confidential or compromising content?

Apart from these disaster scenarios there are the more mundane headaches of the day-to-day maintenance of a laptop or desktop. A high proportion of IT budgets are spent on the maintenance of desktops and laptops; back-ups, patches, updates and upgrades all of which need to be planned and distributed across the corporate network. Again, most industry professionals understand these problems and have established procedures to cater for these issues. However, the IT department’s goal is to deliver the flexibility, agility and productivity of a laptop without the traditional hassle and cost.

The emerging solution lies with desktop virtualisation or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Many organisations are already implementing server virtualisation technologies. Designed to free server and database workloads from fixed ties to server hardware this offers the benefits of consolidation, lower total cost of ownership and flexibility. Now, similar benefits are being extended to desktops, centralising previously distributed endpoint PCs into the datacenter.

By 2010, virtualisation will be the single most important technology for IT departments, according to research firm Gartner. According to Gartner's figures, in 2007 there were about 540,000 virtual machines deployed around the world, not including consumer usage (e.g., desktop virtualisation products like Virtual PC and Parallels Desktop). By 2009, that figure is expected to soar to over 4 million. Gartner VP, Brian Gammage, confirmed “by the end of 2010 all new PC deployments will be virtualised”.

For many years corporate IT departments have used Microsoft Terminal Services or Citrix Presentation Server to provide a stable, ‘locked down’ desktop environment to the user, who could be using a regular desktop PC or a smaller, quieter and ‘greener’ thin client device. It has also been possible to run a run a ‘virtual PC’ in a server environment, but the access and management of these was always complex and difficult to manage. As server virtualisation went from strength-to-strength technology vendors such as market leader VMware turned their attention to virtualising the desktop. With the addition of ‘connection broker’ software which leverages the directory to connect the user with their virtual machine the solution became a commercial reality.

As virtual desktop deployments mature both the user and the IT department are realising the advantages. Desktop computing power can be delivered on demand. New desktops can be instantly provisioned, based upon the user profile (or even a group profile); a new user can be productive within minutes of starting a new role or project. The user can access their own enterprise desktop from anywhere offering a connection, even from home. New applications can be deployed with significant cost reductions and these can be maintained simply by updating the master image. The individual virtual machines are far more robust; any problems encountered by the user will be isolated to that user, this is particularly useful for developers.

However, the end user needs to have the ‘full PC experience,’ so the solution has to deliver multiple monitors, bi-directional audio and video, streaming video and full USB support (conversely all of these can be disabled to control security and cost impact). The user also has the ability to personalise their working environment and store this within their own profile. This means that personal touches like your own background wallpaper and screensaver can be used rather than the corporate standard. It was these personal touches that often caused the reluctance to let go of the traditional PC.

The choice of desktop device or access point can now be taken into consideration. With all of the processing power now being consumed at the server the power required on the desktop can be reduced considerably. Sean Whetstone of Reed Employment moved to thin clients and has quantified these cost savings “The reduction of over 2,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum through reduction of 450 servers and 5,100 PC’s all of which were powered 24x7. This equates to approx 5,500,000 kilowatt hours saved per annum making a significant financial saving in utility bills”.

The capability and performance of the end-user device still needs to be considered before some functionality can be delivered, for example video and audio quality. But many of these are being addressed by innovative software solutions rather than boosting the performance of the end device. Ultimately a device with an internet connection and graphics capability will be all that is required, this opens the doors to devices such as a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

Even now the last technology gaps are being closed, the whole premise of this solution is that the end-user is always connected. It is hard to imagine a useful device that is not connected today and service resilience is so good that you are statistically more likely to have a hard disc failure on your PC than be unable to connect to the internet. Writing that last-minute presentation on your laptop on the transatlantic flight is still a challenge, but this will soon be closed with the ability to either connect whist airborne, drive your applications from a USB stick or work disconnected and synchronise upon arrival.

Desktop virtualisation is already developing into ‘Desktops as a Service’ and will ultimately become part of ‘Cloud Computing’ – one of the hottest topics and most overused phrases of the year. So the next time you work on your laptop on that long-distance flight don’t worry about your applications and data, they are somewhere up there in the clouds with you.

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Steve Brown has been creating value for ICT businesses for over 20 years, holding senior positions ranging from General Manager and Sales Director to European Vice President with a number of suppliers, both large and small. His direct and channel experience includes infrastructure and networking software, virtualisation and thin clients and specialist software for the aviation industry. He has travelled widely on business throughout Northern Europe, the Middle East and South Africa and developed many successful partnerships and sales channels in these regions.

Contact point: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevebrown235