Video showing AutoCad 2011, VDI using XenDesktop over Internet connection.
Back-end uses a FX1800 and the drawing is what the GPU can handle.
Video: AutoCad 2011, VDI Using XenDesktop
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VDI A Solution For Business Services Deployment
Once viewed as the formula for desktop PC provisioning and management roles, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technology is moving into the mainstream via a new path, as a solution for business services.
Most enterprise administrators have viewed Virtual Desktop Infrastructure as a way to deliver enterprise desktops to users more efficiently. However, VDI can deliver more than just a typical business desktop; the technology can also be used to deliver specialized business services.
A case in point is bank hardware vendor Diebold, which is now running a pilot program to deliver ATM (Automated Teller Machine) services via VDI. Diebold’s program aims to transform how enterprises deliver business services by divorcing the dedicated/proprietary hardware from the business service through virtualization technology.
In a phone conference, Mark Kropf, who works in Diebold’s Emerging Technologies division, explained that most ATMs in the United States today are based on a built-in PC processor, which runs a version of Microsoft’s Windows XP. He added that over time those installations have become complex and difficult to manage. Kropf acknowledged that going the VDI route will give Diebold and its banking customers the ability to more efficiently deliver ATM services.
“We do have a process to go in and retrofit an ATM with a zero client device and uplift the ATM to extend its useful life,” Kropf said. Diebold is building its virtualized ATM solution using Cisco products. The success of Diebold’s project will have a lasting impact on the VDI market by demonstrating how VDI can be used to do more than just physical enterprise desktop replacement. There is a potential for additional growth.
In a study last year, ABI Research predicted that the worldwide market for hosted virtual desktops is forecast to grow from about $500 million in 2009 to nearly $5 billion in 2016. North America and Europe will comprise the majority of the market for virtual desktops throughout the forecast period. If VDI can be extended to more than hosted virtual desktops, the market could grow even more significantly than ABI Research has predicted.
Diebold has an OEM relationship with Cisco to help create the zero client devices for the ATMs. Diebold has standardized on the Cisco UCS server platform for their server core and backend services. Kropf said that the VDI deployment in the server core is very dense since the memory and CPU specifications for a virtual ATM are much lower than is required for a typical user desktop.
Cisco UCS, which was announced in March 2009, is a converged server platform that is optimized for virtualization and VDI deployments, which has continually evolved to offer more capabilities and services. Kropf noted that moving towards VDI has not been without its fair share of challenges for Diebold. When Diebold started the project more than two and a half years ago, each virtual ATM required more than 100M bps of bandwidth.
“VDI is very focused on the user and we have a kiosk setup–and the UCS performance numbers were based on server virtualization,” Kropf said. “So we’re constantly testing and learning more about our density and how far we can push it.”
“There are so many things that this opens up. And that is why instead of working in a silo and taking five years to develop this, we’ve announced this early and we’re working with customers,” Kropf said. “We see this as a story that will continue on in our industry and our cloud computing future.”
Author: Frank Ohlhorst
Source
Pumping The Brakes On Desktop Virtualization?
There’s evidence in the channel that organizations are growing increasingly gun-shy about following through on desktop virtualization pilots and deployments. Their uneasiness, according to virtualization experts, stems from higher than expected infrastructure costs, technical complexity and a return on investment that’s typically slower to materialize compared to server virtualization.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Desktop virtualization goes hand-in-hand with mobility, and the arrival of Windows 7 and Apple’s iPad were expected to be catalysts for the technology. Centralized management and simplified security are also attractive features. But while interest in desktop virtualization remains high, organizations are hesitant to pull the trigger.
“Our customers are asking a lot of questions about desktop virtualization, but we have not seen a tremendous amount of traction,” said Dan Weiss, CEO and co-founder of Varrow, a Greensboro, N.C.-based solution provider. “We have a lot of proof-of-concepts, but not many full-blown implementations.”
Cost and complexity aren’t the only factors stalling the desktop virtualization market. Chris Minnis, virtualization services manager at Mainline Information Systems in Tallahassee, Fla., says the growth of tablet usage in the workplace, coupled with the emergence of HTML5 as a mobile application delivery mechanism, have caused organizations to freeze desktop virtualization projects.
Their fears are understandable if one subscribes to the idea, often raised by Apple, Google and VMware, that we’re already living in the post-PC era. “Customers are trying to figure out whether to use desktop virtualization as a conduit to their applications, or whether HTML5 is going to change application delivery and completely overhaul their reliance on the OS on end user devices,” Minnis said.
When Mainline Information Systems launched its virtualization practice in 2006, most of its desktop virtualization revenue came from deploying the infrastructure to support remote connectivity. But since then, Mainline’s desktop virtualization revenue has failed to grow at the rate it had anticipated, Minnis said.
While the bumpy economy has been a factor, Minnis says customers are waiting to see how things play out in mobility before placing their bets on a specific technology. “We’re starting to question the viability of our desktop virtualization practice,” he said. “Customers are seeing potential for the desktop — both as a device and as a role — being potentially replaced by something else.”
Another aspect of the desktop market has been a whirlwind of marketing hype around virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), a term that vendors have stretched to the point of being synonymous with desktop virtualization — at least in customers’ minds.
The reality is VDI is one method of implementing desktop virtualization, but not the only one. And for many potential customers, it may not be the best one, said Simon Bramfitt, founder and research director at Entelechy Associates, a Concord, Calif.-based virtualization consultancy.
Bramfitt says VDI works well in call centers, healthcare, and financial services organizations that have large numbers of task workers requiring very high availability at the endpoint. Organizations that have very tight control of their desktop environment and a well defined application portfolio with minimal variation would be also be candidates, he said.
While VDI is a fit for certain scenarios, some virtualization experts feel that vendor marketing glosses over the associated cost and complexity of the technology. And down the road, this often leads to disillusioned customers.
Simon Crosby, former CTO of Citrix’s Data Center and Cloud division and co-founder of security startup Bromium, says vendors are pushing VDI as mature, when in fact it’s “very immature.”
“People have to learn about how to manage hypervisors, buy servers, buy storage, and buy networking equipment. And they have to get comfortable with managing all this stuff prior to getting VDI up and running,” Crosby said.
Like Bramfitt, Crosby also believes that VDI is sometimes deployed in environments where a different type of desktop virtualization would have been a better fit. “If the goal is access to multiple client devices, primary devices and tablets, Terminal Services does this just fine — and it’s already well understood,” Crosby said.
As is often the case, it often falls on solution providers to wave away the smokescreen. “A lot of time customers hear the marketing song and dance and are convinced that desktop virtualization will help them. But it may just be a fit for a percentage of their users, and it doesn’t have to be 100 percent,” Scott Miller, director of business development for virtualization and cloud at World Wide Technology (WWT), a Maryland Heights, Mo.-based based solution provider.
At WWT, Miller leads a national team of experts focused on virtualization and cloud technology whose includes holding desktop virtualization workshops with customers. These aren’t sales discussions; in fact, no products are mentioned at all.
Instead, the WWT team explains the different types of desktop virtualization and where it would make sense for customers to deploy the technology. Instruction on the various flavors of server-based computing — and their limitations — is also included.
As a customer, “You need to first determine whether it makes sense to do it at all. We’ve been doing this long enough that it’s refreshing for us to tell them no,” Miller said. “We can quickly determine from what application stacks customers are using which ones are candidates and which are not.”
Varrow’s Weiss also finds himself playing defense for customers that have starry eyed notions of what benefits desktop virtualization will bring.
“We’ve had customers tell us they wanted to roll out 1,000 desktops on VDI, and we said ‘Whoa, hold on, you need to know what that means,” he said. “In reality, desktop virtualization increases management efficiency, but it doesn’t reduce cost.”
The careful, deliberate approach to desktop virtualization appears to be working for WWT. Its VMware View sales rose 100 percent from 2009 to 2010, and this year-to-date sales are up 400 percent. Meanwhile, XenDesktop sales rose 150 percent from 2009 to 2010 and are up 200 percent this year, Miller said.
“We’re seeing growth in this market,” Miller said. “For new opportunities, it’s still the fastest growing solution.”
While the desktop virtualization party will probably never achieve the same level of raucousness as server virtualization, most solution providers agree that it’ll always play a role in some industry segments. Whether the technology becomes more widespread than it is today remains to be seen, but for now, the industry’s migration to desktop virtualization is happening with tentative steps.
Author: Kevin McLaughlin
Source
Client-Hosted Virtualization
Virtualization has been a boon for multiuser systems, letting them run the Windows operating system and applications on servers. Each user’s state is saved as a virtual desktop that can be remotely accessed from PCs, laptops, netbooks, tablets, smartphones and even dumb “thin clients” (terminals costing as little as $200). The downside is that remote users of server-hosted virtualization need to be online to take advantage of the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)—a show-stopper for highly mobile workers.
That limitation has provided the motivation for a new paradigm: client-hosted virtualization.
“The world is moving more and more toward mobile personal computing, which is a problem for server-hosted virtualization,” said Terrence Cosgrove, principal research analyst at Gartner Inc. “Client-hosted virtualization is trying to solve that problem.”
The technology uses the native capabilities of the given platform—usually a laptop—to run programs that are synced with a binary image on a server but that execute on the user’s laptop, eliminating the need for the user to be online all the time. Intel, lobbying to get the IT community on board, is hawking client-hosted virtualization as a means of unlocking the native capabilities of mobile devices without sacrificing centralized control or managerial simplicity.
“Intel is building hardware virtualization support into its processors because there is tremendous momentum growing for client-hosted virtualization,” said Sham Sao, chief marketing officer at Virtual Computer Inc., which claims to be the first purveyor of client-hosted virtualization.
Intel is also ahead in hardware support for virtualization with its X86 processors. ARM is prepping virtualization support for the next-generation A15 Eagle core; by 2013, client-hosted virtualization will be possible on an A-15 processor running Windows 8. But analysts say it may take five years for ARM to catch up to the X86 in the sophistication of its hardware virtualization support. For now, that gives X86 processors a corner on the market for client-hosted virtualization, which Intel calls intelligent desktop virtualization (IDV).
“Virtualization often assumes that the delivery system is paramount, and that the endpoint can be anything you want because it is passive and uninvolved in the delivery mechanisms,” said Dinesh Rao, director of Intel’s independent software vendor program. “But at Intel, we believe the first principle of IDV should be ‘centralized management/local execution,’ where the endpoint is a co-equal participant in managing the user’s computing experience. (The two other principles of IDV are described in “Intel’s three tents of IDV,” page 3 of this story.)
Client-hosted virtualization runs apps faster than server-hosted virtualization, works with locally connected peripherals and eliminates the need for all the servers used in a server-hosted VDI. “For a server-hosted virtualization, you would need about 20 servers for 1,000 users, plus 50 terabytes of data storage and a network upgrade to handle the bandwidth,” said John Glendenning, senior vice president of worldwide sales and business development for Virtual Computer. “But with client-hosted virtualization, [for the same 1,000 users,] you only need one server for management and 2 terabytes of storage, and no network upgrades.”
Virtualization itself is platform-agnostic; it runs just as well on PCs as on servers. That allows client-hosted virtualization to offload the server’s tasks onto the laptops that mobile workers already carry.
Server-hosted virtualization users complain that the speed of their network connection becomes a bottleneck, nixing the advantage of having a laptop, which becomes little more than a dumb terminal. Proponents of client-hosted virtualization note that the technique offloads program execution onto the user’s laptop without the expense and networking complications of adding, say, one server per 50 users to the data center, and without compromising the laptop’s native speed.
“The word is getting out that there is an alternative to expensive and user-unfriendly server-hosted virtualization,” said Gartner’s Cosgrove. “The challenge will be convincing organizations to implement a new computing paradigm.”
Avoid Desktop Virtualization ROI Traps
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.”
Slicing OPEX With Desktop Virtualization
Talk to vendors and they will tell you that desktop virtualization is heading for an inflection point. Clearly, in the IT/ITES segment, this technology makes a lot of sense. Other industry verticals, BFSI in particular, also stand to benefit. However, it must be noted that desktop virtualization isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. It needs a large number of users who are deskbound at work. While you can deploy the technology on a laptop and solutions exist that allow you to access a virtual desktop using a tablet or a smartphone, the deployments that have occurred have been for deskbound users such as IT developers or information workers.
Nevertheless, the technology has matured and there are clear benefits for specific scenarios. Also, beyond the efforts of the desktop virtualization players themselves, the ecosystem of storage and server makers are acting as evangelists for these solutions.
Early adopters
Globally, the action has been in the BFSI segment. “The adoption of VDI as a stack has created a lot of interest. However, its adoption by enterprises is slower than what was expected,” said Apoorva Singh, Head IMS, iGATE Patni.
In India, however, it is the IT/ITES vertical that has been the biggest adopter of this technology. Some examples of deployments by this industry vertical include eClerx that has a hundred plus users on a VMware-Dell Blades solution.
Sierra Atlantic that has 100+ users on Citrix Xen-Dell PowerEdge Racks; and Geometric that has gone in for a VMware solution running on Cisco UCS servers and NetApp storage. Microsoft’s application virtualization technology, APP-V, has been adopted in the software services segment by the likes of Infosys and Cognizant. KPIT Cummins has deployed 1,200 seats of VDI from EMC at its Pune facility and, having seen an improvement in response time as compared to the erstwhile physical desktops, is now looking to extend the deployment to its Bangalore facility.
“IT/ITES companies are facing pressure from competitors in countries like the Philippines & Malaysia. Earlier, their set-ups were limited to the metros but, nowadays, you find call centers even in Ahmedabad and Coimbatore. Desktop virtualization enables IT managers in these outfits to manage the infrastructure from a central location,” said Rajat Mehta, Country Head, Emerging Business unit, HP PSG India.
BFSI is the second biggest consumer of desktop virtualization. Here, the likes of PNB and SBI have been the leaders in adopting this technology. Cooperative banks are starting to follow suit for security reasons.
Deployment in other verticals including education, government, telecom and manufacturing has been sporadic. There’s clearly some level of interest but it hasn’t translated into implementations yet except in a handful of cases.
Venkatesh K Iyer, Head – India & SAARC (VCE Initiative), EMC, felt that the reason as to why the IT vertical was such a good fit for this technology was simply because IT companies tended to have development centers staffed with hundreds or thousands of developers who were mostly desk bound and therefore desktop virtualization worked out well for them. “Traditionally, it makes sense for any corporate that is setting up a complex with 500 or more seats. It helps in planning from a project standpoint,” he added.
Rajesh Rege, Sr. VP, Data Center Sales, Cisco India & SAARC, felt that BFSI and service providers were the likely prospects for this technology beyond IT/ITES where adoption was strong. He also felt that, in the medium term, areas like retail where multi-format stores were coming in, each having different merchandising points, would consider this technology. In the case of BFSI, the sector’s affinity for data security and manageability helped make a strong case for this technology. “We are at an inflection point for VDI/VXI and significant adoption will occur during the next 12-18 months,” he said.
VMware cited the example of Mahesh Bank, a cooperative bank that’s deploying VDI. Other than IT/ITES, the vendor has found traction in BFSI and telecom as well. “BFSI is a big play as they have a lot of endpoints to secure, lots of distributed infrastructure, branch-based banking etc.,” commented Seema Ambastha, Director – Technology, VMware India.
Another vertical that’s currently dipping its metaphorical toe in the waters of desktop virtualization is none other than the education segment. Citrix has signed up with Manipal University and the latter has begun using its technology at one of its corporate campuses. Even manufacturing hasn’t been wholly immune to the technology’s charms. Perfetti Van Melle India has deployed desktop virtualization from Citrix.
Then there’s the SMB segment where thin client adoption (as the front-end for desktop virtualization, thin client adoption automatically means that there are VMs running in a data center somewhere) is starting to pick up. “We have seen this in the West Zone where a lot of SMBs are going in for thin clients. Some of them go in for a solid-state device with a Linux kernel or a combination of the Linux OS with OpenOffice. Now that online productivity solutions like Google Apps and Office 365 are available, their adoption will fuel this trend. 90% of people use office productivity tools. 3G’s already available and once Reliance launches its 4G offering, SMBs will go for this in a big way,” said HP’s Mehta.
CAPEX doesn’t go away
It’s interesting to note that what should have been a downer has proved to be the virtual desktop’s saving grace. CAPEX that would otherwise have gone towards buying PCs is now being spent on acquiring servers and storage and this has made true believers of vendors who otherwise wouldn’t have batted an eyelid to help this category along. The upshot of the compute and storage shifting to the back-end is that server and storage vendors have become major boosters of this technology.
In terms of server iron, a high-end Intel box, either 2- or 4-way with lots of RAM (128/256 GB), with a second one for high availability, can manage about 200 users. 50 TB of storage would be required for a thousand users although that can come down if flash memory is used in the storage array. Other storage technologies that can bring down utilization include thin provisioning and dedupe. For remote access, some sort of WAN accelerator solution is recommended.
Storage tiering can prove handy in a virtual desktop scenario with applications being placed on one tier and user data on another. Automated storage tiering technology can help by putting frequently accessed data on flash storage to dramatically boost performance.
It’s worth noting is that before deploying desktop virtualization, a company has to virtualize its servers and storage. It’s clear that deploying this technology entails substantial investments at the back-end. However, the good news is that most organizations are considering server and storage virtualization in order to boost efficiencies in any case. They can tag the desktop virtualization implementation onto the server and storage virtualization project by over provisioning on both fronts to the extent that is required to support the number of virtual desktops that they intend to use.
It’s all about control
EMC’s Iyer argued that deploying virtual desktops was all about bringing down the OPEX. “It’s easier from a patch management and upgrade perspective; it’s easy to commission or decommission virtual desktops; it’s power efficient and it can easily be backed up. From a security standpoint, it can help prevent data loss that would usually occur if a laptop were lost. With the proliferation of iPads and BlackBerry phones, being able to give these users access to their virtual desktops on these devices boosts productivity. The number of IT administrators needed to manage the desktop resources is half of what you need in a conventional environment,” he said.
Dell’s experience has been that deployment time goes down significantly once a company moves to a virtual desktop scenario.
With hundreds of people joining IT/ITES/BFSI organizations on the same day, with cloning technology, virtual desktops could be made ready for these users within 5-10 minutes. “The time need for provisioning desktops has gone from weeks to a few hours or less,” said Syed Masroor, Manager – Pre Sales, NetApp India.
As desktop virtualization places everything in one place, it simplifies DR/BC etc. Moreover, while the loss of a laptop can prove dangerous in terms of data loss and harmful to a company’s reputation, it becomes less of an issue when you go in for this technology. The upgrade/refresh cycles are fewer as thin clients last longer. It’s also easier to give additional resources in terms of memory or storage to a user than in a conventional scenario, pointed out Suhas Kelkar, CTO, APAC & Global Director of Innovation & Incubation, BMC Software.
According to Anoop Nambiar, Country Manager – Business Partner Organization, IBM India/SA, the benefits of desktop virtualization included extending the life of desktop PCs, lowering the business risks associated with data security, compliance and disaster recovery and expediting the roll out of any application or OS upgrade (E.g. SAP or Windows 7).
“If it takes 20-30 minutes to deploy Microsoft Office on to a physical desktop whereas it’s a drag & drop operation in a virtual desktop scenario,” said K Chockalingam, Enterprise Solutions Architect, Quest Software.
“Once you centralize management, you can bring in all the best practices and apply them at one go to the desktop environment. This is something that couldn’t be done previously as these desktops had to be managed individually,” said Andy Karandikar, Services – Head, Red Hat India.
“Management and support costs are lower in a desktop virtualization scenario particularly when you have users in locations scattered across the globe. Customers may not require thick clients for all of the users and thin clients, that consume a fraction of the power (10% or so), can be used. The longer refresh cycle of 6-7 years for a thin client vs. 3-4 years for conventional desktop PCs and lower base cost of thin clients are other advantages of this technology,” said Krishnan of Wipro.
HP’s Mehta explained that although, on a per seat basis, the CAPEX was comparable to that of buying a PC, OPEX savings would allow you to recover costs after 18 months. Centralizing the compute resources in the data center allowed you to manage and allocate resources with ease. Beyond the substantially lower power consumption, being solid-state meant that thin clients did not require an AC environment. The chances of virus attacks and data leakage were also minimized. The technology also promoted work from home or any location other than the office as users could connect using a Web client/VPN.
Singh of iGATE Patni emphatically stated that organizations seeking a rapid RoI were better off looking elsewhere as it would take a span of five years for the benefits to be realized in a desktop virtualization deployment. These benefits would include savings in terms of the money that would otherwise have been spent on managing desktops as well as in terms of break/fix and remote support. “In a VDI environment, in terms of compliance, it is easy to control policy adherence or access rights. It changes the way that you manage the desktop and the capability of each machine is limited to what the server admin mandates,” he added.
It’s worth noting that the RoI of a desktop virtualization roll out only comes into play when you are talking about several hundred users. On a 1:1 comparison, it doesn’t work out. Talk about 200-300 or more users and it’s a different ball game altogether.
How Indian organizations go about virtualizing their desktops
In terms of sizing, the experience of the vendors polled varied with pilots running to anything from 25 to 100 seats and final deployments working out at thousands of seats but over a span of several years as the concerned user companies went through their respective desktop refresh cycles.
CIOs manage things so that the desktop virtualization effort coincides with their hardware refresh cycle. They start looking into what’s possible about 6-8 months before the refresh cycle commences,” commented HP’s Mehta.
“Typically, there would be a new facility or development center that’s coming up and the company decides to take advantage of that fact and pilot the concept of desktop virtualization to see how it works from the standpoints of network utilization, ease of deployment and user acceptance,” said Cisco’s Rege.
Indian organizations typically start with a POC of 25 seats followed by a wider pilot of 75-100 seats and then, once they have ironed out all the wrinkles, they scale up to several hundred users or even thousands of users
“For a thousand users plus, we have seen the process take 45-60 days. Often, customers take a small sample of 30 or 60 or 100 users and do a simulation after which then they come up with a design that lets them extend the deployment. It is important to study the network topology, OSs in use and to look at the data center, access rights etc.,” said Dell’s Venkat.
Not just VDI
While VDI has dominated the desktop virtualization arena to a large extent, it’s far from the only option. Vendors such as Citrix and Microsoft have other technologies that also play in the virtual desktop world. These include terminal services from Citrix as well as application virtualization and OS virtualization from Microsoft. Terminal services is lighter than VDI in terms of allowing you to support more users per CPU but it is a shared desktop scenario which means that one user’s changes or problems could affect another. VDI, on the other hand, offers a dedicated virtual desktop for each user with the upside of being more stable but it also consumes more CPU resources on the server.
Application virtualization or APP-V is a client-based virtualization technology that lets you run multiple versions of the same application in a test and development environment or to support hot desking where the same PC will be used by many users (e.g. in the BPO industry). There’s also OS virtualization or MED-V that lets you run several OSs on a single PC. It could be to support a legacy application that hasn’t been ported or for test and development work.
For task workers who work on one or two applications and don’t require too much of personalization, application virtualization in a hosted or shared desktop scenario would be the most appropriate solution. For knowledge workers who access more applications and require some amount of personalization, VDI is best suited. For users who require high-end graphics such as designers—a blade PC in the data center would be ideal. Graphics designers or CAD CAM users would require a high-end desktop. “For laptop users, you have client virtualization. Citrix has the Xen client that allows you to continue working when you are offline. When you connect to the server, the upgrades and patches are transferred and your changes are synchronized,” said Harish Krishnan, GM – TIS, Wipro Technologies.
Dell’s experience was that VDI was usually the foundation and that based on the customer’s requirements it would offer terminal server or blades as part of a virtual data center stack, commented Sitaram Venkat, National Manager, Enterprise Solutions Marketing, Dell India.
Sanjay Deshmukh, Area VP – India Subcontinent, Citrix Systems India Pvt. Ltd., said, “The hosted share model supports three-four times as many users as VDI does.” His argument was that while the top brass would expect a high quality of service and VDI was necessary for them, for others lower down the organizational food chain, particularly those running fewer applications that were less resource hungry, the hosted shared model worked out just fine. He recommended the Xen client, which creates a VM with your corporate image that you can work on in an offline environment for sales executives. “Whenever you connect to the network, it syncs what you’ve done. If it is lost, you can send a kill PIN and delete it,” he added.
According to him, “The typical ratio that we have seen in the enterprise is that 20-30% of the users are on VDI, 70-80% are on hosted share while Xen Client or streamed desktop would be used by less than 5-10% of the user base.”
BMC’s Kelkar’s take was that VDI had come to rule the roost in this area on account of it solving the problems associated with terminal services where multiple remote sessions shared the same machine and one session crashing could take down the server.
Not everyone agreed with that assertion. 80% of the users tended to be on terminal services while the rest required a proper desktop infrastructure, felt Apoorva Singh, Head IMS, iGATE Patni.
“For a bank teller who does all of his work at the office, terminal services is fine. For a user who needs to work from home but lacks connectivity, MED-V or APP-V makes sense. Whenever we talk about desktop virtualization it almost always gets associated with VDI, however,” said Sumeet Khanna, Director, Windows Business Group, Microsoft India.
Overall, it was clear that companies that had decided to take the plunge were going in for thin clients and replacing their existing desktop base as part of the existing refresh cycle.
Having said all this, it must be stated that desktop virtualization is no magic bullet. While it works well, superbly so, in many use cases, the usage of client-side VM technology hasn’t quite taken off yet and for users who travel extensively, it’s not the best solution.
BMC’s Kelkar made this rather interesting point that it was the IT department that was pushing desktop virtualization because the biggest payoff was for these folks. “IT administrators want people to use virtual desktops. End users aren’t asking for them,” he pointed out.
Insights
- Outside IT/ITES where it’s been a big success, the traction of this technology has been muted although BFSI institutions are also deploying it to some extent.
- Desktop virtualization doesn’t reduce the initial CAPEX. All it does is that it shifts the costs from the front-end into the data center where you need to buy additional servers and storage.
- The benefits here accrue from ease of management and greater control. Moreover, if a company goes from using PCs to thin clients during its hardware refresh, then it can save considerably as thin clients cost about half as much as PCs and they offer substantial power savings to boot as these devices lack moving components. They also last longer allowing companies to stretch their hardware refresh cycles. Another benefit is that organizations that have gone in for virtual desktops can rapidly provision desktops for new users.
- There are multiple desktop virtualization technologies out there of which VDI is simply the most prominent one. For users who don’t have particularly heavy requirements, even terminal services would do. For the ITES segment, application virtualization works well for hot desking.
- Not everybody in an organization can be migrated onto a virtual desktop. Folks who travel a lot wouldn’t really benefit much from this although there is the option of an encrypted virtual desktop client that syncs when you reconnect. Users of 3D graphics or CAD/CAM and other graphically intensive software would need blade PCs, which would be easier to manage but wouldn’t provide any CAPEX savings.
- Desktop virtualization is loved by IT administrators as it makes their life a lot easier but users need to be handled with care as the thought of losing their PCs can be devastating for some users (the P in PC, after all, stands for Personal Computer). Change management must be handled with care.
Choosing the right device
While thin clients have lots of advantages, they aren’t PCs and that alone is enough to put off lots of users. Having said that, manufacturers are finding ways and means to strengthen the value proposition of these devices further by incorporating technologies such as PoE into the mix.
“Eventually zero clients will be replaced by devices that are powered from the network (PoE). The thin client vendors will launch these products a few months down the line,” said Mehta of HP.
Talking about the choice between going in for a thin client or a PC, Microsoft’s Khanna said that a thin client was the better option for VDI. However, for those companies that weren’t ready to refresh their desktops just yet, Microsoft offered its volume licensing customers the option of dumbing down a PC to a thin client with the intention of improving control and manageability. For this, the vendor has Thin PC a separate thin client OS that it recently launched which converts an older PC into a thin client running a stripped down version of Windows 7.
Another potential trend that many vendors highlighted was that of employees bringing their own devices such as tablets or smartphones to work. In this scenario, desktop virtualization would allow a company’s IT department to lock things down by delivering the corporate environment through a VM so that the data never left the company’s premises insuring it in the case of loss or theft of a device and shielding the company’s networks from the possibility of malware attacks from infected client devices. “VDI works very well in this scenario. You click on an icon and your device joins the virtual network and everything else is isolated. As far as the traditional desktop/laptop environment is concerned, it will go the thin client route connecting through VDI/VMview,” said HP’s Mehta.
NetApp’s Masroor talked about the emerging class of ‘thin’ laptops as exemplified by Google’s Chromebook that booted up in a jiffy and could be set up to access a desktop image on the server offering a mobile desktop virtualization solution.
Delivering the desktop as-a-service
When it came to Desktop-as-a-Service or virtual desktops in the Cloud, the consensus was clear. This service, although quite popular abroad, has yet to catch on in India. Cisco’s Rege argued that it was just a matter of time, however, before it caught on not simply for business users but also for home users who would log into the public cloud from a thin device and consume the desktop from it.
BMC’s Kelkar said that the various characteristics of the Cloud that included on demand, self service, pay-per-use, resource pooling, elasticity etc. all tied well into the virtual desktop proposition.
Wipro has been offering DaaS abroad for quite some time now and it recently launched the service in India as well. Wipro’s Krishnan said that temporary workers could bring in their own devices and connect to virtual desktops provisioned by the customer in this scenario thereby reducing the headache of the IT department and helping customers save on cost even when they gave a stipend to their users to buy their own devices.
“You would see all of these offerings being delivered through a hybrid Cloud model where you retain the ability to work even when you are not connected to the Cloud. Through DaaS, you can have the option of picking VDI or terminal services. The issue is that of connectivity,” said Microsoft’s Khanna.
Citrix’s Deshmukh’s contention was that it would benefit customers who would otherwise find it hard to come up with the initial CAPEX that’s required for the adoption of desktop virtualization. To begin with, it requires an investment that’s 30% higher than buying conventional PCs. In the long term, however, there’s a positive RoI of 30% because companies save substantially on OPEX. The initial outlay on the servers and storage can be a hurdle for some and DaaS can do away with it.
And in the end
In many ways, every IT deployment’s success or failure comes down to how change management is handled. In the case of desktop virtualization, Rege argued that it wasn’t the technology that fell short. It was the mindset that was missing. Until companies were comfortable with workers being out of sight but not out of mind for days or even weeks at a time, they wouldn’t be comfortable deploying a technology that supported working from locations other than the office using a variety of devices.
Most of the folks interviewed for this story were emphatic that the concept of employees bringing in their own devices would also contribute to the popularity of desktop virtualization in the Indian enterprise.
Today, deployments are largely in IT/ITES followed by BFSI. It’s unlikely that PCs will be overthrown en masse in the near term but this technology does have compelling benefits for any scenario where there are hundreds or even thousands of workers who don’t really utilize their desktop PCs to the max and need a set of four-five applications that can very well be run in the data center. These are use cases, moreover, where the user is largely immobile like a bank clerk or a BPO worker. While you can access a virtual desktop from pretty much any device, be it a tablet or a smartphone, this aspect of desktop virtualization would have to
compete with widgets that have emerged as the preferred means of delivering enterprise data to mobile devices in a format that’s easy to comprehend and act on without overtaxing the limited processing capabilities of a mobile device. Then again, with the advent of devices such as the Chromebook, you could well end up seeing lots of users quite happily working on a desktop in the Cloud. For the corporate world, this would be delivered through the DaaS model. Connectivity remains the fly in the ointment. Although 3G’s here, coverage remains spotty even in the big cities and until that’s ironed out, desktop virtualization is likely to be more popular with the IT/ITES, BFSI crowd for the aforementioned use cases.
Desktop Virtualization Can Help IT Manage Consumer Devices
If two technology trends were ever made for each other, at least in vendor marketing materials and generically simple diagrams of IT infrastructure, they are the consumerization of IT and desktop virtualization.
Analysts who study desktop virtualization say many of its use cases fit neatly into problem areas that their client companies face, such as the consumerization of IT. End users who insist on using non-standard or unapproved computing devices, such as tablets and iOS or Android smartphones, make demands on the IT department, the remote-access infrastructure and the IT budget, according to Ian Song, research analyst at IDC. When the same user wants to use two, three or four computing devices for different reasons, the situation can quickly get out of hand.
“You’re not going to give everyone two or three computers or try to set up your applications and infrastructure to support every device everywhere, no matter what your resources,” Song says.
The clearest solution is to create a virtual desktop that runs on a server in the data center but that can be launched, viewed and used as easily by an end user in the office at a traditional computer as by a worker logging in from a PC in a public kiosk or smartphone connecting via open WiFi.
That setup—full-blown virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementations—is becoming far more common but will probably never make up the majority of virtual desktops, let alone outnumber traditional physical desktops, according to Chris Wolf, a research vice president at Gartner.
It’s by far the most expensive form of virtual desktop—especially compared to streamed or Web-based applications that can be used from tablets, smartphones and other traditional devices that support VPNs or other encrypted connections, Wolf says.
“People tend to talk about desktop virtualization as if it’s one solution, or even a set of solutions, but there has always been a range of implementations,” he says.
Traditionally, virtual desktops consisted of dumb-terminal, shared-server/shared application setups used in call centers, banks and other transaction-heavy environments in which employees work in shifts and several may use the same machine on the same day.
That’s still the most popular implementation, and the least expensive. Other implementations let IT match the functions required by the user with the complexity and cost IT can afford, Wolf says.
Some users might stream to the desktop one application they use only occasionally; others may be set up to choose several applications to be streamed from an internal corporate “app store” or even work full-time on a “desktop” that is actually a virtual machine running on a data-center server—which requires the resource-intensive VDI server setup.
“A certain percentage of people—maybe 20 percent—will be appropriate for full VDI, where most others will use either mostly streaming apps or stream the apps and OS onto their own laptops, and some will just have traditional installed apps.”
It’s not hard to put a Web front end on an application and make it available through an internal server to users on a range of client hardware, but thats not the most secure or manageable arrangement, according to James Staten, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research (FORR).
Applications are more secure and easier to control and support if IT is able to put a hypervisor on every device an end user wants to use, Staten says. Not every device needs a hypervisor designed expressly for its hardware or operating system—which Citrix sells and VMware (VMW) is developing—but native hypervisors perform at much higher levels than those installed later, no matter which vendor makes them.
Not only is the connection more secure than streamed apps or SSL, the hypervisor lets IT create a whole environment in which it can apply the same security, applications and policies it does on a company-owned computer that never leaves the building.
“That makes it a lot easier to enforce policies on anti-virus and security updates and keeps anything you might install on the ‘home’ part of a device from sneaking over into the ‘work’ section and corrupting drivers or transmitting a virus,” Song says. “Just because of the number of end users and client devices, there’s a real scale issue especially compared to virtual servers.”
Trying to scale virtual infrastructures to keep up with virtualized, consumerized hardware is a nightmare for IT operations people, who are often already struggling to move past the barriers and plateaus many companies hit during large-scale physical-to-virtual server migrations, Staten says.
“When you’re doing a lot of P2V, server virtualization looks like a massive cost savings. But when you get past the point where you’re taking out a lot of hardware and you start to see a lot of proliferating VMs and you start consuming a lot of virtualization, it can look like the costs and sprawl are out of control,” Staten says.
Virtual desktop costs are exponentially greater than virtual servers, simply because the number of desktop machines is higher, Staten says. Even among a fully virtualized workforce, every employee needs some type of hardware at the desk, which can range from a normal PC to a zero-client terminal from Wyse, Pano Logic or other thin-client hardware vendors.
Every additional user means more load on the data center for authentication, storage, and most expensively, to run the virtual machines, virtual applications and streaming services that are actually running the apps, Staten says.
Demand is even greater for companies with lots of power users who run applications that are particularly resource-intensive and require a high level of security and data-center quality availability and backup, Song says.
IT can mitigate the growth in cost by giving different users different amounts of virtual “power”—which translates into space and computing-resource use in the data center. They can cut down data-center costs drastically by using hypervisors to create two separate virtual environments on every laptop—one available to the worker for personal use, the other for work that requires a secure login and keeps the virtual machine dedicated to the “work” environment clean of viruses, driver conflicts and other problems unofficial use can introduce, Song says.
In that case workers do use a virtual desktop, but it lives on their physical laptop or smartphone, rather than on a backend server.
While Citrix sells native hypervisors for most smartphones and VMware for one or two, that two-phones-in-one approach is growing only slowly because of the cost and complexity of maintaining virtual machines on many types of devices within the same workforce, Song says.
The sheer variety of machines is a problem because it is so important for the hypervisor to be as close to the processor and under as many layers of system software as possible, Song says.
Type II hypervisors run on top of the operating system even of resource-constrained devices like smartphones, eroding performance.
Native “bare metal” Type I hypervisors would be better, but aren’t available yet, Song says. Citrix is due to ship its version of native hypervisor code this summer. VMware has announced it is working on bare-metal hypervisors, probably for release early next year.
“More than anything else the thing that can kill a project or save it is hardware compatibility. IT can’t go tweak all its templates and rewrite all its software to support 100 different form factors,” he says. “Expanding the HCL [hardware compatibility list] is the key to a lot of this. It doesn’t solve all the problems, but it gets you past the first bunch of them.”
Source
Desktop Virtualization vs Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
I think a lot of people confuse these two virtualization technologies and maybe you’re one of them. The distinction is not apparent from the names given to them but rather in the scale of the technologies behind them. Desktop virtualization means that you run a virtual machine on your desktop computer. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a data center technology that supplies hosted desktop images to remote users. There is, as you can see, a huge difference between the two.
But, before I discuss more about desktop virtualization or VDI, I need to establish a baseline of information and terminology so that we’re speaking the same language.
The basic premise behind virtualization is that it is a “computer within a computer.” An operating system runs within an application (virtualization software) that emulates or abstracts actual hardware into a standard set of virtual hardware. Virtual hardware consists of virtual disks, virtual CPU(s), virtual memory, virtual display, virtual serial ports and so on.
Some examples of this type of virtualization are Oracle’s VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, VMware Workstation, QEMU and Microsoft’s Virtual PC.
Desktop virtualization is the simplest form of this computer within a computer concept. Generally speaking, desktop virtualization is a single desktop computer that hosts a single guest virtual machine. The virtual machine can be a Linux system, a Windows desktop or server, a FreeBSD system, a DOS virtual machine, a Novell server, a Mac OS X or another operating system.
This type of virtualization makes running another operating system easier and more efficient than dual booting for the operator. The desktop system user/operator can run a host system simultaneously with the guest and enjoy the advantages of both systems. Application developers can test new software on virtual machines without the need for dozens of physical systems sitting around losing value.
And, virtual machines are much easier to rebuild should something go wrong. Reimaging a physical system might take several hours whereas creating a new virtual machine takes minutes.
VDI is an alternative to traditional desktop computing. The theory behind it is that removing the desktop operating system from a local computer and placing it in a shared hosting environment, like a cloud hosting data center, relieves some of the costs associated with desktop support. There seems to be a great deal of myths, paranoia and general resistance against VDI. Some of that resistance stems from the assumed control one has over a local operating system and cloud security.
At the hardware level, VDI consists of virtual host system clusters that provide the computing horsepower for groups of virtualized desktop systems. In other words, you have a group of VMware ESX host machines on which your Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux desktop systems run. You connect to your desktop via remote connectivity software from any Internet-connected device.
You can connect via a secure virtual private network (VPN) connection so that your information travels to and from the remote desktop in an encrypted format. Contrary to popular belief, these hosted systems are no more or less secure than any other desktop system from a pure software perspective. You still must have anti-spyware, anti-malware, anti-popup and firewall protection installed on every one. Requiring a secure connection between the remote client and the desktop operating system makes the service safe to use.
Microsoft Releases Windows ThinPC Desktop Virtualization Tool
Microsoft on Tuesday trumpeted the release to manufacturing of Windows Thin PC (WinTPC), software that lets organizations repurpose their older PCs as thin clients. Microsoft plans to make WinTPC available for public download on July 1.
The WinTPC RTM doesn’t include much in the way of new features, only minor tweaks such as a keyboard filter that prevents the use of common Windows key combinations like Ctrl +Alt + Delete as a security measure. WinTPC now also supports international keyboards and allows customers to use PCs using their existing Key Management Server (KMS) or Multiple Activation Key (MAK), Karri Alexion-Tiernan, director of product management for Microsoft Desktop Virtualization, said in a blog post.
WinTPC is a smaller-footprint, locked down version of Windows that runs a limited scope of applications, including security, management, terminal emulation, Remote Desktop and similar technologies. In Q3, Microsoft will add Forefront Endpoint Protection support to WinTPC, Alexion-Tiernan said.
WinTPC can also run Web browsers, media players, IM clients, document viewers, .NET Framework and Java Virtual Machine. WinTPC includes support for RemoteFX, a set of desktop virtualization features that allow video and other rich content to be delivered to desktops, laptops and thin clients.
What Microsoft doesn’t want is customers running Office on WinTPC machines, and the software giant recommends that customers that use productivity apps opt for a full-blown PC.
Microsoft’s goals with WinTPC are to lower VDI deployment costs and pave the way for customers to make thin client computing a bigger part of their desktop virtualization strategy, Alexion-Tiernan said. It’s also a response to customer demand: In a recent industry survey, Gartner found that 60 percent of respondents are looking to switch old PCs to thin clients.
PCs running Windows Thin PC won’t require Microsoft’s Virtual Desktop Access license (VDA), which allows customers to virtualize home PC and kiosks that aren’t covered by SA for an annual fee of $100 per device. However, the WinTPC RTM is only available to volume licensing customers with Software Assurance agreements.
Desktop Virtualization: Licence To Bamboozle?
Desktop virtualisation presents many technical choices but they could turn out to be the easy bit. Licensing the software is where it all gets difficult, especially when the software is Microsoft Windows.
The problem is that Windows licensing is based on the assumption that you install software on hardware, but virtualisation abstracts the hardware away.
“Microsoft does not sell a user licence for clients accessing or running Windows. Customers often want to license Windows based on a user model that allows the user the flexibility to gain access from any device,” according to a Gartner report.
Fat chance
The authors think the chances of Microsoft introducing site licensing for Windows OS are “remote”.
So how is Windows licensed in a virtual environment?
If you are doing session virtualisation with Remote Desktop Services (RDS), you are in luck. There is only one instance of Windows running on the server, and all you need is a Windows Server Client Access License (CAL) supplemented either by a RDS CAL, which is a perpetual license, or by Microsoft’s Premium VDI Suite, a subscription that include RDS CALs.
An RDS CAL can be per user or per device, but you cannot mix and match. Per device is great if you have many users sharing a few PCs, and per user is great is you have users with several devices; if you have both, you just have to do the sums.
One for all
That’s session virtualisation. If you want to use a virtual hosted desktop, where all users have their own Windows virtual machine (VM), it gets more difficult and expensive.
You might think that Windows has to be licensed for the VM on the server, but it is not that simple. Each device that accesses that VM has to be licensed.
There are two plausible ways to do this. First, if you have a Windows PC with Software Assurance, Microsoft’s subscription covering upgrades and support, then that PC is covered automatically. Second, if you have a device such as a thin client that does not run Windows natively, you can obtain a Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) licence for that device. This is subscription-only and costs about £68 per device per year.
This is not just for your main thin-client device but for each one you use. Imagine, for example, that you normally access your virtual hosted desktop from a Windows 7 PC. Then you get an Apple iPad and use a remote desktop client to access your Windows virtual desktop. Microsoft requires a VDA license for that iPad to make it legal.
Free to roam
However, if the iPad belongs to you personally, and you are the primary user of another licensed device, then you can use the iPad for free under roaming provisions.
This is just the Windows licence. If you are also using Citrix or VMWare technology, for example, further licences apply.
Few applications are as complex as Windows in licensing arrangements. Adobe, for example, licenses its desktop software per user – not per concurrent user – irrespective of whether it is running locally or on a remote VM or in a session on a terminal server.
Microsoft Office, however, has some wrinkles. “Generally only licences obtained through the Microsoft Volume Licensing Program can be deployed to a network server for remote access,” says the company’s guide. In other words, you need a subscription.
Why does Microsoft make it so difficult?
“While the demand is real, we believe Microsoft’s ability to move away from per-device licensing for Windows will create a cascade of issues (such as OEM agreements, revenue forecasts and profitability) for which there are no simple solutions,” says Gartner.
The simple solution is to use an alternative operating system – except that for many organisations that would create another “cascade of issues”.
In the meantime, it seems that Microsoft really wants you to have Windows devices and subscription licences if you are heading down the virtual desktop path.