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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
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Client-Hosted Virtualization

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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.”

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Slicing OPEX With Desktop Virtualization

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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.

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Virtualization Is Shaking Up Security Practices

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The move to almost fully virtualized computing environments is driving a fresh approach to security [1] in the enterprise, according to information technology security managers applying controls for VMware and Microsoft [2] Hyper-V.

“We’re very close to being 100 percent virtualized,” says Gurusimran Khalsa, systems group supervisor in the state of New Mexico’s human services department. That organization’s servers are based on VMware’s vSphere, and a virtual desktop project is being started, too. The agency’s 170 server [3]-based VMs (virtual machines) run in its local data center [4], with a range of Web applications [5], multi-tiered IT systems, file servers, domain servers, SharePoint, and SQL servers.

Because of a security breach that occurred a few years ago — the loss of sensitive data was considered so serious that several IT staff were laid off — the agency in Santa Fe has sought to keep a tight rein, requiring two-factor authentication to get into servers and introducing “air gaps” to protect some sensitive data. But at the time, while the benefits of virtualization, such as server consolidation, were being introduced, it wasn’t fully understood how this transformation would impact security, says Khalsa.

Increasingly, there was concern among security and compliance officers that if VMware’s vCenter management console were compromised, the game would be over. “It’s the central point of access to vCenter that manages our production environment,” says Khalsa.

To beef up controls there, the agency decided to install the HyTrust virtual appliance, which intercepts administrative requests to the virtual infrastructure to determine which requests are in line with the organization’s policies. “We have a couple of vSphere admins at a higher level of access,” says Khalsa. HyTrust can be set up to ensure only certain workloads are permitted to boot up in specific hosts or clusters, and it can label virtual objects and apply policies to them.

The agency also began using the Juniper vGW Series firewall [8], which is based on its acquisition of startup Altor Networks [9] last December. “The firewall is positioned between the VM and vSwitch,” says Khalsa. “It’s set up similarly to a regular firewall, with least privilege.”

While the agency still uses VLANS to cordon off some servers, the Juniper virtual gateway firewall provides far more granular controls, and has the ability to do introspection on the VMs to see what’s installed and set rules based on that, says Khalsa.

Other agencies and businesses say they also needed to look at new approaches for security in their virtualized environments.

“We’re about 80 percent virtualized,” says Rick Olejnik, chief information security officer at Brookfield, Wis.-based law firm Rausch, Sturm, Israel, Enerson & Hornik (RSIEH), which specializes in debt collection and has offices in 13 states.

One of the main concerns the law firm had was securing credit-card data in its VMware ESX server environment, even though the credit card numbers are defunct. About a year or so ago the banks and financial institutions which are RSIEH’s clientele made it clear that although these are no longer active card numbers, they still need to be protected according to the Payment Card Industry rules.

That meant encrypting them. Ojenik said that led to the decision about eight months ago to deploy the Vormetric appliance for encryption key management along with encryption software on ESX servers to encrypt PCI data at rest, while the agent software works to un-encrypt the data to allow the application called Collection Master to access and process information.

“It’s happening at the kernel level and there have been no performance issues at all,” says Olejnik. But besides adding encryption to the virtualized computing environment, another security control at the law firm depends on using the Palo Alto Networks application-layer firewall to partition off VMs. “This allows us to do the segmentation required on our internal network,” says Olejnik.

At Wellington College just outside London, one of the main concerns had been finding a way to bring in better threat detection, rogue-device identification, access control for guests and visibility of network usage into a VMware-based ESX virtualized environment.

To that end, the college has started using ForeScout Technologies CounterACT Network Access Control Virtual Appliance, out since mid-June, to monitor the college’s VMware-based hosts. It runs as a VMware guest VM, and works in tandem with the ForeScout physical appliance. Tony Whelton, director of IT services and development at Wellington College, says the ForeScout Network virtual appliance is checking for security vulnerabilities and “doing real-time scanning across the LAN for any kind of rogue traffic.”

The California state Department of Economic Development, which administers the state’s unemployment insurance, disability and workforce services, is shifting into a Microsoft Hyper-V-based virtualized environment for servers while also becoming far more centralized than it has been in the past in terms of management.

Now past the halfway mark into a fully virtualized environment, the agency has sought to improve its collection of logging information through use of the LogLogic products, mainly for security purposes and database monitoring, says John Cleveland, chief of the security and compliance section. “You have to be able to show who accessed this table at this time, for example,” he says.

The shift to server virtualization is bringing heightened concerns about the security of the virtual host, and there are challenges in monitoring what happens from VM to VM, says Cleveland. While the agency does not yet use cloud-based services, he points out the move to virtualization makes it more possible that the agency could make use of hosted customized applications in the cloud. He says he sees a growing need for products that act as a central repository related to both security and content in a virtualized environment for compliance purposes. “I see a need to have these merged,” he says.

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Desktop Virtualization vs Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

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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.

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How VDI Can Change The Desktop Management Game

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VDI can simplify the tasks that make desktop administrators hate their lives — the one-by-one operating system upgrades, Windows patch management, client hardware failures and end-user mishaps. But virtual desktops won’t solve any problems without proper planning and infrastructure.

In fact, many virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) proofs of concept fail because of infrastructure, said Tom Scanlon, CIO of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS).

When MCPHS explored a move from physical desktops to VMware View virtual desktops last year, Scanlon quickly learned that the college’s infrastructure needed serious upgrades to handle the higher bandwidth, storage area network (SAN) and CPU power requirements.

“I thought we could support 24 desktops with our existing infrastructure during a pilot, and I almost pulled the plug because the response time was awful,” Scanlon said. “But that wasn’t the software’s fault; it was our hardware.

“Once we went through and refreshed the hardware, it was like night and day,” he added. “You have to have the right equipment, [or] you won’t get a good interpretation of how [virtual desktops] will work for you.”

The case for VDI

Despite the added infrastructure investments, VDI still made sense for MCPHS because the school had to simplify desktop management for the 19 IT pros who support 4,000 students plus faculty and staff at its three campuses. Plus, the college’s computer labs are on an accelerated refresh cycle of new PCs every two years. That cycle is expensive not only in terms of hardware, but also in IT support, Scanlon said.

MCPHS hired Salem, N.H.-based integrator Mosaic Technology to redesign its infrastructure. It did a SAN refresh with Dell EqualLogic iSCSI storage and updated IBM BladeCenter servers with six-core processors and maxed-out RAM, Scanlon said.

So far, the school has replaced about 700 desktops at computer labs in Boston, Worcester, Mass., and Manchester, N.H., with thin clients and VMware View 4.5 desktops using PC over IP (PCoIP). Scanlon said now that the virtual desktops are properly provisioned, the performance level is about the same as a regular PC, and it’s consistent.

“I haven’t had any complaints from the students, and believe me, if they weren’t happy, they’d be outside my office with pitchforks,” Scanlon said.

Scanlon chose View because MCPHS is already a VMware shop using ESX to virtualize servers. The lack of profile management in VMware View didn’t matter, because the college’s virtual desktops are all generic. A new desktop image is provided each time a new user logs in, and MCPHS uses Google Apps instead of locally managed Microsoft Office software to reduce storage requirements, he said.

The downside for end users is video performance, particularly over the wide area network (WAN), because View 4.5 doesn’t support PCoIP over the WAN. But PCoIP is supported over the WAN in View 4.6, which the college will upgrade to over the coming months.

The big benefit to students is that they don’t have to go to the college computer lab to run college-owned apps. “Now they can access all programs and applications from their own devices, from anywhere,” Scanlon said. “No one has to wait for a computer terminal anymore.”

Dustin Fennell, CIO of Scottsdale Community College in Arizona, moved to virtual desktops in 2008 for similar benefits. “Our primary reason was that the traditional black-box replacement cycle is expensive, inefficient and not sustainable when budgets are declining,” he said.

The college, which supports about 12,000 students per semester and more than 800 employees, uses Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp to deliver applications and data to remote students and faculty. Scottsdale Community also created a Web portal for end users to access college applications, including AutoCAD and Adobe Creative Suite 5, that are delivered from either XenDesktop 5 or XenApp, depending on the app.

“We moved to VDI because we want to get out of the business of managing desktops,” Fennell said. “Now we provide stateless personal desktops that follow users. And our apps actually perform better than they do on a brand-new computer, because we aren’t installing apps on the system, slowing it down.”

VDI also makes operating system upgrades much faster, MCPHS’s Scanlon said. In the past, his IT department used Symantec Ghost software to do Windows upgrades one by one. Now they can use that imaging tool with View to roll out multiple Windows 7 desktop images in minutes.

And when end users mess up their systems, IT can roll out a new desktop without having to touch the users’ machines. “Before, if someone had an application issue, we would have to take everything offline,” Scanlon said. “Now we can just update the image and tell the virtual desktop to rebuild, and the problem is fixed in a matter of hours.”

He said Scottsdale Community College is taking things a step further and moving toward an environment where there are no OSes on any client machines, and everything is virtual, Fennell said.

For a while, the college ran in hybrid mode, with some apps delivered from the Citrix environment and some apps running locally. Now, there are no locally installed apps, other than Microsoft Office on Windows. “Eventually, there will be nothing on the endpoint device,” he said.

VDI: An investment in efficiency

Moving to virtual desktops won’t reduce MCPHS’s IT costs for at least a few years because of startup expenses including licensing and infrastructure, but the college expects to see a return on its VDI investment within five years. For example, Scanlon said he spent about $300 per thin client, which is expected to last more than five years, versus $600 for the laptops that MCPHS bought every two years.

Scottsdale Community College funded its virtual desktop buildout using capital that would have been spent on PC replacements, and though VDI does cost more upfront, the long-term efficiencies are significant, Fennell said.

“Virtualizing your desktop environment may cost more, but if you think outside the box and look at what the end users want and need, between VDI and application virtualization, you can provide better access and better performance,” Fennell said. “We save $250,000 per year at this point, and now the IT department actually funds innovation grants…. It has been a transformational change for us.”

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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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Hosted Desktop Strategy Questions

One of the challenges of evaluating cloud computing and the use of hosted desktops in the small business enterprise is understanding not only the business case ROI, but the operational impact. Here are 30 questions to assist you in thinking through the issues associated with deploying hosted desktops.

First some definitions:

VDI, Virtual Desktop infrastructure = Dedicated Virtual Desktop (hosted desktop)

There are two kinds of VDI: server-hosted and client-side. A Server-Hosted Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a dedicated remote desktop solution providing remote access to Windows XP/Vista/Win7 or Linux desktops. The virtual machines are run from within the data center. The virtual infrastructure increases the system’s independence, availability and manageability.

The following questions should be part of the analysis to deploy a hosted desktop strategy:

1. What are the use cases? And does the use-case require Virtualization?

2. What do I want to achieve?, lowering TCO?, business enabler, overall cost of ownership and cost reducer?

3. What is the business case?

4. What’s the user experience using Multimedia, NextGen, Video/Voice, 2D/3D applications? What do users expect from the hosted desktop?

5. What endpoints do we support and facilitate and what is the role of these devices in the end-user experience?

6. Secure Access and Secure networking, how do users, with a variety of endpoints (rich, thin, zero-clients and mobile devices) connect to the hosted desktop?

7. What is the impact of Secure Access and Secure Networking solutions on mobile devices while connecting to the hosted desktop? What is the user experience with these solutions?

8. Do we need to manage the endpoints?

9. How is the hosted desktop managed? OS deployment, application distribution, patch management etc. etc. Is client management mandatory?

10. Do we need image management?

11. How are Windows applications delivered within the hosted desktop? Unattended or manual Installation, Application Virtualization or the applications are part of the (golden) image? What is the strategy?

12. Are User Installed Applications inside the hosted desktop needed?

13. What is the performance and storage impact of Application Virtualization?

14. What is the impact on storage and how does it affect the business-case?

15. Do you need local or centralized storage?

16. Do we focus on stateless (pooled, shared) and/or stateful (assigned, private) images?

17. What is the impact on storage, manageability, security, legal and business-case?

18. What is the impact of client management solutions in a stateless VDI scenario?

19. How do we design, build and maintain the (golden) Image(s)?

20. Windows 7 or Windows XP as core hosted desktop OS platform? x64 or x86?

21. How does the solution scale? What do we need from a scalability point of view?

22. How do we size the hosted desktop and corresponding infrastructure and what are the best-practices for optimizing the hosted desktop?

23. What is the performance and bandwidth impact on the network infrastructure; LAN, WAN, wLAN?

24. How do we design, build and maintain the user’s profile and his workspace?

25. Licensing; Operating System, Client Access Licenses and (Business) Applications?

26. Do we need to backup (and restore) the hosted desktops?

27. Is Anti-Virus needed? Inside the VM or as service module on the Hypervisor? What is the performance impact of AntiVirus?

28. Is the IT organization mature enough to support and maintain the complete technology stack? What is the knowledge and skill-set of the IT-department?

29. Is separation of Operating System, Application and User Preferences inside and outside the hosted desktop part of the overall strategy?

30. Bottom Line: What’s your current desktop strategy?

meshIP can assist you with the strategy and deployment of hosted desktops and other cloud services.

Hosted Desktop Strategy Questions

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