Tag Archives: desktop infrastructure

BYOD Tools

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In a bid to make virtualisation and cloud computing more palatable to enterprises which have a high concentration of mobile users, or are implementing a Bring your Own Device (BYOD) strategy, VMware has launched a fistful of new products and a public beta of a system that offers what it describes as “Dropbox for the enterprise”.

The products available today and later this year bring to life the product roadmap that VMware outlined at its major user conference last year. According to Tim Hartmann, senior manager of systems engineers for VMware in Australia; “If you look at all the releases they dovetail into BYOD in a big fashion.”

At the heart of that is the release of VMware View 5.1 which offers IT managers a caching methodology to take the load off the underlying storage systems that are accessed by end user devices. By removing the bottleneck Mr Hartmann said it was possible to have a higher density of systems attached, which led to a lower cost per desktop.

The company claims that the total cost of ownership associated with a virtual desktop infrastructure could be cut by up to 50 percent thanks to optimising storage loads. The tool also provides a single management console from which IT managers can control provisioning, con?guration management, connection brokering, policy enforcement, performance monitoring, and application assignment.

VMware has also launched Horizon Application Manager. Since buying TriCipher in 20120, VMware has been offering that tool in the US. Horizon however has been recast for the global market.

“This is a way of creating a single sign-on … for whatever cloud based applications you are using,” said Mr Hartmann.

The system uses Active Directory to handle the authentication for each user. Instead of needing user IDs for each cloud service a user subscribed to, Horizon now manages that access.

“From an administrator’s perspective you can say yes you are allowed to use this service – but also if someone leaves then you can turn that of with the flick of a switch,” said Mr Hartmann.

VMware has also launched its vCentre Operations for View tool which provides IT managers with a traffic light style dashboard to illustrate the end user experience and identify problems.

While this form of insight has been available for virtual machines in the data centre for a while, this extension of the tool allows IT managers to monitor how their end users’ devices – whether desktop, mobile, virtual or BYOD – are performing, and where necessary tweak the system to improve that performance.

Finally the company has launched a public beta of its Project Octopus programme, which Mr Hartmann described as “Dropbox for the enterprise.” Originally three local companies signed up for the private beta pilot of the programme, but Mr Hartmann says that there are now 20 companies trialling the system, which has been made available as a public beta from today.

It will be launched officially later this year.

“It presents you with a folder and that becomes your document repository, which can be made available to other nominated users,” instead of emailing large files around an enterprise, he added.

Author: Beverley Head
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Highly Available Desktops

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The restart-only availability level allows for failure of a component such as a host or storage array. Failures generally manifest as the equivalent of a “blue screen” for the virtual desktop. Consider what happens when one of your physical desktops crashes — do the users generate a help desk ticket or do they simply restart their system?

A key advantage of virtualization is the ability to decouple an operating system from its hardware layer. This improves flexibility and maximizes up-time. Virtual server infrastructure commonly utilizes this flexibility to provide high availability, moving virtual servers between hosts. When planning and deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution, the question you must ask is: “How do we design the desktops to be highly available?”

First, you must determine whether you need your desktops to be highly available. This will depend on several factors, including assigned desktops or pooled desktops, persistent or non-persistent desktops, profile management and user data management. For example, using non-persistent desktops in a pool for multiple users will have different requirements than using dedicated persistent desktops.

To determine the need for high availability and the associated costs (both in capital and operating expense planning), you must first understand the components of high availability as well as the various level of high availability.

Components of High Availability

The primary component of high availability for virtual desktops is the underlying virtualization infrastructure. This will most likely be VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Hyper-V. All of these platforms offer high availability features such as live migration — the ability to move a running virtual machine from one physical host to another. This is a major benefit, because it allows the virtual desktops to be moved among physical hosts based on capacity, performance and maintenance windows.

Another component is your storage infrastructure. In order to migrate machines from one host to another, the virtual machines must be stored on shared storage (SAN or NAS). If you want to implement tools such as live migration, each host in the cluster must be able to read and write from the same shared storage repositories. It is also ideal to separate user data and user profiles from the virtual desktops. This user information should live on the network, making it available outside of the virtual desktops, increasing the flexibility of user data access.

The underlying VDI management components, such as Citrix XenDesktop controllers or VMware View brokers and their supporting databases, should be configured for high availability and fault tolerance to ensure that the virtual desktops can be managed and connected at all times.

Levels of High Availability

When planning for high availability, start with a fundamental understanding of how critical your system is. In other words, what kind of risks are you willing to take? How long can your network be down? These questions are of paramount importance, since planning for 99.999 percent availability is significantly different (more complex and more expensive) than planning for 95 percent availability.

When designing virtualization projects, I tend to group a company’s need for high availability in these three buckets: none, restart only, always on.

None: This implies no high availability of the virtual desktop. This may include a lack of redundancy on the controller level, a lack of shared storage, or possibly just no level of guarantee. I generally don’t recommend this level except for testing units that are not critical to daily functions and can suffer one or more days of downtime for a total rebuild — if required.

Restart Only: This level allows for limited downtime but assumes recovery within a minimal window (one hour or less) and typically requires a system reboot for maintenance. This is the most common type of high availability for desktops (and commonly for servers as well.) Restart only level allows for failure of a component such as a host or storage array. Failures generally manifest as the equivalent of a “blue screen” for the virtual desktop. Consider what happens when one of your physical desktops crashes — do the users generate a help desk ticket or do they simply restart their system?

Always On: This level allows for the greatest level of high availability and fault tolerance. It is designed to support the most mission-critical systems. If any component should fail, there is a redundant partner or real-team recovery in place to prevent outages. I see this scenario rarely used for virtual desktops but commonly used for critical system servers.

Since restart only is the most common scenario, I’ll delve a bit deeper into that design. The easiest and most cost-effective method is using pooled, non-persistent desktops combined with user profiles and data management. That allows the virtual desktop to be truly volatile.

Using a pooled scenario, all desktops are based upon the same common single image. If you have 1,000 virtual desktops defined in a pool, a user can connect to any one of those 1,000 desktops with the same user experience. Combining with user data management (such as folder redirection) as well as profile management (roaming profiles, Citrix Profile Manager, AppSense Environment Manager, VMWare Persona Management, etc.) makes the random assignment transparent to the end user.

In the event of a virtual machine crash, the user will lose any unsaved work just like a local workstation crash. To recover, the user does not need to wait for the virtual desktop to restore but should be able to launch a connection to a different desktop through the connection broker. All of the user’s applications and data will be available, assuming there are available virtual desktops to be assigned.

In a dedicated or persistent model, the user can still reconnect but will have to wait until the virtual desktop recovers and is available for a new connection. This is very similar to waiting for a local desktop to reboot.

Choosing the right level of highly available desktops depends on a number of factors, including any existing service level agreements with your users and your risk mitigation requirements. You may need to plan on multiple tiers of high availability based on the needs of the target user groups and the types of virtual desktops being deployed.

Author: Andy Paul
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Desktop Virtualization Approaching Tipping Point

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Cost reduction, security, manageability and simplifying the migration to Windows 7 are driving organizations to adopt an aggressive deployment approach when it comes to desktop and application virtualization, say the results of a study conducted by Forrester Consulting.

Over half of the 546 organizations surveyed ranked desktop and application virtualization as a critical or major initiative over the next 12 to 18 months. Furthermore, deployment levels are predicted to grow from 27% to 46%, taking the number of virtual desktops in organizations from hundreds, to tens of thousands in the next two years.

“While only 13% of respondents said they had completed their enterprise roll-out of Windows 7, organizations across all industries and geographies are prioritizing their investments in desktop virtualization,” commented Ettienne Reinecke, Dimension Data’s CTO. “In addition, early adopters are now also emerging from regions other than the heavily regulated industries in North America and Western Europe.

“Overall, 40% of organizations view investing in, or implementing desktop and application virtualization as a high priority, while 12% believe this a critical priority over the next 12 to 18 months. However, organizations looking at desktop virtualization as a silver bullet to address desktop challenges must first understand their business drivers, workforce demands and the state of their application ecosystems before defining their next-generation desktop roadmap”

“Typically, an organization will start by piloting desktop or application virtualization to a small group of users and then scale out deployments,” says Reinecke. “The most successful deployments we’ve seen are those designed with workforce segmentation in mind, where the end result is a combination of traditional and virtual desktops that suits the end user’s requirements.”

Organizations are quickly realizing the need to transform their desktop infrastructure. The focus on Windows 7 upgrades, the maturity of desktop and application virtualization, coupled with business pressure to embrace the consumerization of IT and bring-your-own-device policies, has created the perfect storm for organizations to modernize their desktop infrastructure.

However, Reinecke warns organizations against pursuing desktop virtualization purely as a cost reduction tactic.

“There’s a general misconception that a desktop virtualization initiative will translate into immediate cost savings. This is underscored by the fact that 60% of the research participants cited cost saving as one of the main drivers for desktop virtualization projects,” he points out. “Desktop virtualization requires significant investment in the supporting network infrastructure, servers, storage upgrade and software licensing fees to ensure that the solution can effectively meet business and end user demands.”

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Avoid Desktop Virtualization ROI Traps

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If potential cost savings are driving your desktop virtualization decision, beware the ROI killer: Over-provisioning.

Over-provisioning is a nice way of saying you’re throwing money away. That could happen in a variety of forms, such as buying infrastructure that it better suited for a much larger company, planning for growth that doesn’t happen, or not doing your homework on what other technology you’ll need to support virtualization. But fear of wasteful spending shouldn’t stop you in your virtual tracks; rather, it should motivate informed, careful decisions.

Raj Dhingra, CEO of NComputing, believes 2011 is a turning point in desktop virtualization deployments among small and midsize businesses. Dhingra, who left Citrix to take the NComputing helm in April, also said the broader field of virtualization vendors has taken note: “Everybody sees there is a big opportunity there.”

As the number of viable virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) options for SMBs increase, Dhingra recommends paying close attention to four key areas when making a decision. Doing so can help minimize the over-provisioning risk and ensure a real return on the investment.

1. Look for platforms specifically designed for SMBs. While a vendor’s ability to scale with the growth of your company is important, don’t let your daydreams overshadow your actual needs–starting small can provide a bigger ROI in a shorter period time.

“Buy the shoe that fits rather than buying the shoe that’s two sizes bigger in hopes that you’re going to fit into it over time,” Dhingra said.

The most obvious place to look is the cost per seat: This often tops the $1,000 mark in enterprise platforms, which makes the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) case trickier for SMBs. “If it’s now costing you more than a PC, that’s your first red flag,” Dhingra said. He added that TCO/ROI analysis for a 100-seat deployment is not the same thing as a 100-seat proof of concept–with an expectation that several thousand seats will be added later.

It should be noted that for some SMBs, ROI isn’t just a matter of comparing virtual desktop versus traditional PC costs. At Infinity Sales Group, for example, both desktop support and power costs were major factors. For Silicon Valley Builders Group, mobility was the critical payoff in going virtual. In fact, the firm’s CIO noted in an interview that just comparing per-seat costs can be a dead-end: “It would be a hard sell. Virtualization is still something like $1,200 per user, versus a PC I can go buy at Fry’s for $500,” he said.

No matter your particular business case, cost-per-seat is obviously still important. The moral: Don’t pay for seats you don’t need.

2. Know your supporting infrastructure needs. Desktop virtualization doesn’t mean you’re leaving hardware behind. Make sure you have a complete understanding of the supporting pieces you need, both on the server or host side and the client side. For the former, this includes things like servers, storage, and networking equipment. On the client side, don’t forget to account for the actual devices–such as thin clients, for example–as well as your software needs.

Dhingra said not taking all the necessary components of VDI into account is a key budget pitfall for SMBs, particularly if the initial investment is based on an expectation of significant growth. It can also lead an organization to an infrastructure it’s ill equipped to manage.

“That means not only the capital to actually procure [VDI], but then do I have internal expertise within my company to actually deal with this and work with it?” Dhingra said.

3. How many vendors are you willing to work with? Another possible sign you’re headed down a path of over-provisioning: If your desktop virtualization project requires one or more multi-vendor components. This is likely a bigger issue for the “S” in SMB. While a midmarket firm with, say, 750 employees has more resources to manage multi-vendor platforms, a 50-person company might not want the potential headaches. More importantly, it might not have enough IT resources to do so. “It becomes a systems integration project that is typically suited to a larger company,” Dhingra said.

4. How soon until you’re up and running? You can’t really start the ROI meter until your deployment is complete, right? For budget-constrained SMBs, a multi-month (or even year-plus) VDI project adds hidden costs–another form of over-provisioning–that can immediately dull the shine of potential savings. Moreover, smaller companies usually thrive on their speed and agility–IT projects should be no different. Dhingra said IT pros at SMBs should factor training and skills developments here, too: If you lose two days at an off-site training, for example, that’s an expense–even if the event is “free.”

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Why Your Next Desktop Will Be Virtual

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There will always be a need for conventional desktops and notebooks for specific users, but desktop virtualization has matured today. In fact, it’s time to take a hard look, not just a passing glance, at what it can provide.

The magic that virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can provide is in taking a fairly inexpensive thin-client device, giving it access to your data center from anywhere, and allowing that device to take on the image of a typical desktop. VDI provides the device with all the data and applications you need throughout your day, and then reverts to the proverbial tabula rasa when you shut it down. Because no data is stored on the device, you never have to worry about proprietary data falling into the wrong hands if the device itself—desktop, laptop or tablet—is lost or stolen.

VDI should change the way you think about the desktop. For your users who fit the bill, there are significant reasons why VDI makes sense right now.

Five reasons to examine VDI now

Reason No. 1: Hard cost savings

Thin clients cost less and they last longer (six to seven years versus four years for a notebook). They also consume a fraction of the energy of a desktop PC (as low as six to seven watts for thin clients versus 150 watts for PCs).

Reason No. 2: Ease of management

Thin clients are easier to patch and upgrade. They have slower generational changes than PCs so you’re not swapping out newer versions all the time.

Reason No. 3: Centralized backups

When using virtual desktops, everything is backed up centrally, which is easier on data center operations and eliminates local drive issues. This makes sense for tablets as well since they are not a traditional client device and their backups most certainly are not handled by most enterprise backup applications.

Reason No. 4: Regulatory compliance

Since all the data and applications are centralized, VDI makes it vastly easier to enable and enforce processes and procedures to ensure security, privacy and other best practices.

Reason No. 5: Productivity gains

VDI encourages telecommuting or remote working, which can contribute to higher productivity, better morale and lower office space expenses while decreasing demands on help desks. If there are problems, it’s easier to troubleshoot standard images and integrate applications with standard hardware. Plus, users need less training with standard images.

While these reasons to examine VDI now are substantial and worth considering, VDI isn’t for everyone—at least not yet. To be successful, you need to be very selective with the users you choose to bring into the VDI model. But for those users that can take advantage of VDI, the benefits they reap may feel a bit like magic.

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Desktop Virt Roll-outs: Upfront Pain For Long-term Gain

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Ultimately, companies are unlikely to fund a desktop virtualisation project until the numbers look good. How can you build a good return on investment case for virtualising your desktop infrastructure?

One of the problems with building an economic case for desktop virtualisation is the initial capital expenditure involved, explains Rajendra Deshpande, chief technology officer at Intelenet, a business process outsourcing provider.

“Typically, the initial investment will be higher, which means that the justification for that investment becomes more challenging and needs to be proven,” he points out.

Anything that can be done to reduce up-front capex will therefore ease the transition to a virtual desktop environment. This could include not refreshing desktop hardware. Microsoft’s Ian Moulster suggests reusing old PCs where possible.

Live long and prosper

“By turning your old PCs into thin clients you can stretch their lifespans. Also, implementing applications streaming technology such as App-V has low up-front costs and a fast ROI – you don’t have to dive straight into VDI, which can require a heavy server and network investment,” he says.

Last year, Forrester carried out an ROI analysis on a school in the US that is using Citrix XenDesktop to deliver virtual desktops to 1,500 PCs over three years. The experience of the school – which achieved an ROI of 170 per cent in five months – shouldn’t be taken as indicative of the ROI attainable with other products, but the evaluation framework provides a good set of guidelines to build a business case, Forrester pointed out.

The ROI study found savings in several key areas. Avoiding a PC refresh saved it money, as did the cost of new server hardware, thanks to the back-end virtualisation effort. It saved money on software licencing, and improved the efficiency of IT staff. Those staff made particular management gains in application upgrades and desktop provisioning.

Most interesting about the Forrester study is the total economic impact (TEI) framework it used, which provides some useful guidance for IT managers projecting cost savings. It broke cost inputs down into areas including software licensing for whatever you’re using on the client and server side.

The situation here will depend on the vendor. For example, Microsoft offers Virtual Desktop Access licencing for free with PCs covered by Software Assurance or separately for thin clients. Client-side hardware costs can be an area of particular savings, says Mark Bowker, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

“We see universities and colleges looking at desktop virtualisation to extend the existing lifespan of the desktop,” he explains.”This hardware won’t support new applications, but with desktop virtualisation you can deliver performance and predictability on an existing hardware platform.”

However, some of these savings can be offset by capital expenditure in the data centre. Server hardware may need to be refreshed with more powerful boxes, for example.

Storage costs can take a considerable chunk of a project budget, especially if a company is starting from an immature position, such as local storage on departmental servers, for example. Then, there are networking costs to consider.

Networks in the data centre may need to be upgraded for speed, and some more resilience might be needed in LANs closer to the desktop.

Finally, there are administration costs to consider. In the Forrester case study, these involved creating images and requirements for individual applications. The analyst firm expected the time taken to manage the systems to fall, as the creation of application images is a one-time event.

Just as difficult

These latter costs shouldn’t be underestimated, warns Ewen Anderson, managing director of Centralis, a desktop migration consulting firm. “A lot of early calculators around ROI say ‘it costs this much to maintain a physical PC’,” he says, “but a lot of the processes for creating the virtualised applications are just as difficult.”

The more fragmented and arcane an organisation’s application base, then, the greater a proportion of the project that cost is likely to represent.

Microsoft, has estimated that the cost of a full VDI implementation will be roughly 11 per cent more than a distributed PC-based environment.

There are some upsides, however. The security gains involved in centralising information effectively rolls discrete security costs into operational expenditure, and so represents hidden cost savings.

Worker flexibility also represents a big gain. How much will a company save by enabling staff to be operational at home when they don’t want to travel to the city because of a flu epidemic? It is important to look at the immediate numbers, but in doing so, don’t lost sight of the bigger, more nuanced picture.

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Still Talking About Desktops … Haven’t We Moved On?

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The desktop computer remains a fixture in just about every business – a fixture that still needs to be maintained, secured and eventually, refreshed. At the same time, the pressures to provide more flexible, cost-effective access to corporate systems is leading organisations to look at mobile and cloud computing desktop alternatives.

So why are we still talking about desktops?

Simply swapping old desktop hardware for new without looking at the latest technology options may miss out on potential benefits of desktop virtualisation. Indeed, analysts at IDC suggest that 34 per cent of corporate desktop delivery had been virtualised by the end of 2010.

However, deciding to virtualise PC environments is not as easy as installing new kit and flicking a switch, where everyone wakes up to a brave new computing world. Users still need access to their corporate desktop systems and data, which is why we still talk about them, despite a growing interest in fully virtual, cut-down mobile or remote access in a number of businesses.

Most employees rely on access to corporate desktops to carry out their daily tasks, so application virtualisation can be a good place to start. This allows IT to deploy applications to clients from centralised application servers.

Separating the hardware layer from the application layer in this way can help preserve existing desktop investments, and widen hardware and operating system options by streaming desktop applications on demand over the Internet or via the corporate network to PCs, terminal servers, laptops and even mobile devices.

Centralising IT management functions through application virtualisation also reduces the need to disrupt end-user access when carrying out upgrades, patching, and terminations, for example. The IT department can standardise security, identity and access management policy enforcement, as well as improve back-up and disaster recovery capabilities. Rationalising the software estate like this can also save on software licensing and other compliance costs.

The application of virtualisation

Microsoft, for example, claims that customers using its application virtualisation solution, App-V, achieved a 27 per cent labour saving, and equivalent cost savings of £51 per PC per year in application lifecycle management, compared with those not using application virtualisation. And its latest version, App-V 4.6, can also be deployed as part of Microsoft Application Virtualisation for Terminal Services .

Many organisations are also deploying virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies from the likes of Microsoft and its partners, including Citrix, so users can access personalised desktops running in the data centre.

This can extend savings already realised from application and server virtualisation, and provide more flexible desktop deployment and delivery opportunities on a wider variety of computing devices. Existing PCs can be reused, while ‘thin client’ desktops with no hard drive, fan or other moving parts can also lengthen refresh lifecycles and lower running costs.

The downside is that you’ll need a robust server infrastructure to handle processing requirements that have been pushed to the data centre, coupled with strong network and security management capabilities. Together, these can offset any savings realised from desktop delivery.

Session virtualisation, where applications run on the server, can require less hardware and server management as well as more cost-effective desktop delivery than VDI. As it can potentially scale to more users per server than VDI, it can also enable a high user density with a limited degree of personalisation, making it more suitable for low complexity or task worker scenarios.

Finally, installing virtualisation on the desktop can ensure that incompatible or unsupported applications continue to run in a virtual environment, detached from hardware dependencies.

Whichever desktop optimisation technologies you deploy, it is important to finely match end-user access requirements with a clear understanding of the merits and demerits of the different desktop delivery options.

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The Economics of Desktop Virtualization

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With Thanksgiving and Christmas behind us and the New Year upon us, it is time to take stock and see what changed for desktop virtualization in 2010.

One thing is very clear: We have moved from desktop virtualization being ‘about to take off’ to ‘has taken off’ — the evidence for this is pretty clear in the number of licenses sold. With volumes sold in the low millions, desktop virtualization is way beyond the tryout and pilot stage. However, desktop virtualization is not yet for every user. There are a number of areas where it’s still not a good fit.

For example, a user who does not always have access to the Internet from his or her laptop may not be able to use a hosted virtual desktop. This is a problem that will be addressed by client hypervisors in coming years. These provide the management benefits of desktop virtualization to the intermittently connected user. For now, they are very new but will become critical for mobile workers and may also have a major role to play in bringing down the costs of desktop virtualization for non-mobile users as well.

Of perhaps more concern is the question of the economic basis for hosted virtual desktops. This has recently become more visible thanks to Microsoft’s paper ‘VDI TCO Analysis for Office Worker Environments,’ which compares the total cost of ownership of traditional PCs and their virtual desktop alternatives. Their conclusion is that hosted virtual desktops are more expensive to deliver than a traditional, well-managed PC. There are a number of interesting points and conclusions to draw from this document.

Firstly, Microsoft compares virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) against a ‘well managed PC.’ This is a key phrase for those of us who work with industry analysts. It means far more than just having policies and necessary technologies in place: It assumes that the PC is locked down to the extent that users can make no changes to the configuration of the machine, including being able to install applications. While this is the most cost effective and secure way to manage a PC, it is not a good solution for many users; either they culturally expect to be able to adapt ‘their’ PC as they see fit or they actually need to be able to install applications beyond those provided by IT.

Secondly, the target user base is an ‘Office Worker’ – the most general and easily standardized user. As with any new technology, it will not be right for everyone from the get go. General office worker’s are not the most appropriate target for desktop virtualization at the moment, partly for the economic reasons that Microsoft sets out. In the case of desktop virtualization the ideal users today are those who are expensive to manage conventionally. These may small groups of users in remote locations or those with pressing security requirements. In the case of the remote user groups, significant savings can come from the reduction in desk-side support that can be made by centralizing execution. Security benefits are always hard to quantify, but being able to keep all data within the data center by centralizing execution and delivering only a display feed to the user can be critical for some government, finance and healthcare projects.

Thirdly, while the report shows that hosted desktop virtualization is more expensive than a traditional PC, the reason that it is more expensive is due to higher software licensing costs in desktop virtualization — principally Microsoft software licenses. In other words, they are both showing that desktop virtualization is more expensive and that they have control of this price difference. When and if Microsoft decides that it is in their interest to change the economics of hosted virtual desktops, then they can flip the switch and change the game.

Whichever way round this plays out looks good for desktop virtualization: Either hosted becomes cheaper or the swing to client hypervisors is faster. This is gratifying to see in light of all the work currently going into early implementations — the work will not be wasted.

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