Ponder This

Monday July 03, 2006

Is it Desktop Virtualization or Server Consolidation?

Figured I throw a post out there although, Sun is closed for the annual July shutdown. This year, I have been asked to focus on getting out and telling our Desktop Virtualization story with partners and customers. VMware recently released Virtual Infrastructure 3.0. The follow on to ESX 2.5.2 and Virtual Center 1.2. This will become a key part of the Desktop Virtualization solution we have been pulling together and deploying for some customers already. I will post some comments on my experiences with VI 3.0 later. I have been updating systems and migrating VM's over the last few days and have virtualization on the brain.

The V word is a hot word right now. There is no doubt it is exciting and the marketing machines are grinding away at cranking out messaging. A lot of which I think are shades of grey at best in regards to value propositions and how to leverage virtualization. Brain Madden is doing a great job of trying to paint a clear picture for what a lot of this really means Brian's Views on virtualization . I tend too agree with most his assessments. His article in 2005 about IBM's announcement is spot on.

In early 2005, IBM made a semi-big marketing splash regarding a Desktop Virtualization solution they were calling the IBM Virtualized Hosted Client Infrastructure. It was a collection of VMware components, their blade servers and Citrix. At the time, I had been looking into Desktop Virtualization for a while. It was a natural fit for Sun Ray thin clients. I knew the challenges we would face and quietly chuckled when I first read about this in Information Week.

Knowing what customers tell me about their pain on the desktop, I have struggled with the value of moving the physical desktops to blades in the case of a IBM or ClearCube approach. Unless you could really get a high consolidation ratio. I also struggled with how the connection between the thin client devices and XP Pro would be handled, unless those devices are CE or XPe based. As far as I am aware, there are only a couple of people that develop their own RDP clients. Are we accessing Virtual Desktops from thin PC's? If so, does that really solve anything for the organizations that have 1000's and 1000's of PC's being used for Knowledge worker tasks such as email, office productivity, data entry etc.

All the marketing hype made me ask myself, what is Desktop Virtualization? I define Desktop Virtualization as taking a desktop based operating system, virtualizing that desktop OS in a centralized server/blade infrastructure, and then accessing it via a ultra thin client device that requires no management, and/or remotely through some other access method when mobile or out of the office.

Taking 2000/2003 with Citrix Presentation Server or just Terminal Services alone, consolidating that on some servers/blades using a hypervisor and accessing a desktop environment, is not Desktop Virtualization. It is server based computing with server consolidation. It still does not solve the age old problem that stops most CIO's from moving to a secure thin client architecture (despite customer personal information leaking from organizations like the facet in my shower), “I have X amount of apps I need to run and I already know they do not work with Terminal Services.”

For customers that have Citrix or Terminal Server farms, front ended with thin clientsor PCs looking to consolidate physical servers into virtual server farms using Virtual Infrastructure 3.0 and Sun's Galaxy line of servers, we can do that already. There are significant gains in doing so as well.

When we set out to pull together a story around a desktop virtualization, we wanted to keep the solution in-line with allowing customers to have choices. We wanted it to be simple, straight forward, easy to implement, provide value and solve a specific problem, which is to enable CIO's and IT organizations the ability to deploy ultra thin clients today, without worrying about the legacy fat client apps they need to continue to support.

The deployments we have done to date have centered around using XP Pro as the primary desktop. Using our Sun Ray architecture, customers can leverage desktop virtualization to deploy their desktop of choice today and still have the option of moving to a Linux, Solaris or future Windows based desktop in the future. As their applications change and moving to a server based solution using any of the above makes sense, they can do so in the future. With our solution, the beauty is they do not need to replace or upgrade the devices on the desktop. Using Sun's X64 based servers in the Virtualization tier of our solution servers can easily be re-provisioned to a server based systems serving our thin clients or continue as virtualization servers hosting the server os serving the thin clients. All the management upgrades and reprovisioning happens in the virtualization tier using common hardware supported by all the required OS platforms.

Are PCs and Citrix, today, your choices for application publishing? That can stay in place, as is, without modification. Part of our solution is a Secure Remote access solution. If you have users authorized to access their PC remotely from home or other locations, they can access their Virtualized Desktop securely via any web browser. It does not requires code be deployed on the client level or managed by the IT team.

The standard value propositions apply, which is more secure, eaiser to manage, increased flexibility, increased mobility and longer desktop-lifecyle. We have some great partners deploying this solution today and adding value. There are really good results from the deployments we have already completed. I look forward to meeting and working with more customers this year and continuing to share our Desktop Virtualization story. If you want to hear more or discuss what we are doing further, please do not hesitate to contact me.