The Virtualisation Buzz

Roly Smoldon, Business Skills, The Channel
August 2007

Even as an executive you would be hard pressed to have missed the buzz about the uptake of server virtualisation over the past 6-12 months. Virtualisation is transformational technology which demonstrates real business values, measurable cost savings and efficiency gains. The server room is the easy first step in virtualisation.

The desktop is the next evolution of virtualisation. This is commonly referred to as Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation (EDV) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

Virtualisation of the desktop offers a much bigger return than the server room as the majority (as much as 60% - 70%) of an organisation’s IT cost is absorbed at the desktop.

For example, if a customer has 70 physical servers in 2 server rooms and 500 desktops across 20 geographically dispersed locations, which cost the most, in time, effort and dollars to manage, maintain and keep secure – the server room or the desktop? If we apply some basic maths to the scenario outlined, it seems obvious that 500 physical pieces of hardware at 20 different locations is going to be a lot tougher and costlier to manage than 70 pieces of hardware at 2 locations. Virtualising the desktop dramatically simplifies and changes this equation to 500 desktops managed on 60 servers in 2 locations.

Desktop virtualisation is a concept and a usage scenario for your virtual infrastructure. By desktop virtualisation, I mean lifting the complete desktop image of the physical PC and running it on your virtual infrastructure in the data centre or service room, so multiple complete desktop images are hosted on a virtual server and separated from the physical PC hardware.

You may ask why you would investigate virtualising the desktop. You probably asked the same question of server virtualisation 12-18 months ago and it has now rapidly become an accepted standard for consolidating infrastructure.

Reasons to virtualise the desktop:

Vista. Whether companies have a strategy or migration plan in place most accept they will be moving to Vista at some stage in the future. Vista requires more resources to run at the desktop, this means you are going to have to evaluate another physical desktop refresh to meet the demands of software. By virtualising the desktop we are breaking the hardware requirements from the software and getting off the desktop refresh treadmill.

Security. It is a personal computer, with local storage, which needs to be patched and updated on a daily basis to be compliant. A virtual desktop runs in isolation on the server, patches and updates are applied once and pushed to the virtual desktops via templates. All the data is secured and controlled in the data centre. There is nothing at the desktop.

Disaster recovery. If a PC crashes or the office is burnt down, recovering the data can be challenging. A virtual desktop runs in the server room, it is backed up in the server room - if a virtual desktop crashes it can be recommissioned immediately and transparently to the user.

Business Agility. With a virtual desktop, new services can be commissioned, rapidly deployed and rolled out to the business as they are required.

Business Orientation Use of Resources. A PC in its current form is an island of resources, it is a personal computer and can only ever be a PC, and therefore a PC has resources such as memory and processors that cannot be leveraged or shared by the whole organisation. By virtualising the desktop you can share the same infrastructure as your servers, which means you can use all the company’s resources, which become very liquid with the flexibility of being able to allocate and change the resources on your server to meet the demands of the business. For example Monday to Friday 9-5, you could be providing desktops on your virtual infrastructure, and over the weekend the same hardware become your database servers.

Application Performance. As virtual desktops and servers can share the same infrastructure, the closer your applications are to the desktop, the better the performance will be.

Reducing Operation Cost. By virtualising the desktop the infrastructure is closer to your IT team. There is a skill shortage, and it is easier to manage and administer 500 desktops in your server room over a high speed network rather than send staff out to 500 disparate desktops.

Greening of IT. The arguments around the inefficiency of hardware in the server room apply at the desktop. A PC has an annual carbon footprint of approximately 2 tonnes. A Wyse terminal for example, draws 90% less power compared to a PC which means lower running cost and reduced carbon footprint.