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Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 2.0 hits the (virtual) shelves!

Over the last few months I've written several posts on the Sun Virtual Desktop Connector. Well, I have great news! The Sun Virtual Desktop Connector is now available as part of Sun VDI Software 2.0, available today for download on sun.com.

The Sun Virtual Desktop Connector is really a fantastic piece of software. It allows you to create pools of virtual machines in VMware Infrastructure 3 (VMware ESX Server 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5) using templates that you define. Are you continually wiping and re-imaging machines for temporary workers? Make your standard image available to your ESX Server, tell the Sun Virtual Desktop Connector how many virtual machines you want to have available and voila, you've got a massively scalable desktop infrastructure instantly. As users connect they are assigned a virtual machine based on policies you define (more on that later) and the pool is refilled. It couldn't be easier.

And you're not limited to one pool. You can create multiple pools that fulfill your standard job functions – maybe you have a pool for the aforementioned temporary workers that contains a severely locked down Windows XP Pro image. And maybe you also have a pool for your Standard Operating Environment (SOE) that contains a more open Windows XP image with all of your corporate applications pre-installed for the general user base. And maybe you have a third pool just for people who work in HR with their unique set of applications. Once you have your different pools, you simply assign which groups of users get routed to which pools.

Once a user is assigned a virtual machine, you can control the life cycle of that virtual machine. You can do things like set the lifetime of the virtual machine (i.e., 5 days, 1 year, and so on), and decide what action to take when processing the virtual machine at the end of its life span. You can choose to simply destroy the VM when it's no longer useful (don't worry, you'll never run out of VMs because the pool is constantly being refilled from the template as long as you have enough disk space), or you can drop it back into the pool as-is. You can even set the VM to automatically revert to a snapshot in VMware. This is fantastic for kiosks, temporary workers, or even for people who store all of their data via roaming profiles on the server because it means they can be working with a fresh environment every time they login. Did your user install a piece of software they weren't supposed to and you don't want to manage it? With this option, it'll be gone the next time they login. No more tech support calls because a user installed application hosed the work environment!

There's another way to assign users to virtual machines, too: you can do it manually. This means you can load up your ESX Server with a bunch of virtual machines (maybe you got them there using a P2V tool) and assign them one by one to your users. From a management perspective, you could opt to treat your VDI architecture a lot like your physical distributed desktop infrastructure. The advantage here would be that you can backup the VMs (how many desktop PCs are really backed up every day?) and take advantage of VMware features like HA and VMotion to utilize your servers in the best possible way. From an IT perspective, there's very little work in "VDI management", you can either setup pools and have it handled automatically, or you can manually manage the virtual desktops like you'd manage the physical machines on users' desks. And when those physical machines start to breakdown, just replace them with anything you'd like (we'd suggest Sun Ray virtual display clients) without disrupting the user.

Speaking of the user, a VDI infrastructure provides some real benefits to them. First and foremost, the onus of data security is shifted from the individual user back to IT. I've never lost a laptop, but I do know that losing a machine with sensitive data on it (Social Security numbers, medical records, credit card numbers, payroll records, and on and on) is a very big deal. Not only is it unpleasant for the people whose data has been compromised, it has a tremendous cost from a public relations standpoint and maybe a measurable cost in the cleanup effort. However, if all your data is on the server and is never really sent to your client device (you're only manipulating pictures of it!) you can't lose it.

Data security is probably in and of itself enough reason for an end user to like VDI. However, there are two more that I'd like to talk about that are related to each other. The first is the ability to work with your full complement of applications, network resources, etc., available to you from nearly anywhere. We do this here at Sun and I can't tell you how many times it's come in handy. Instead of having to manage different sets of documents on my laptop and my work computer, I keep everything on my virtual desktop environment and access it remotely when I need it. If I bring my laptop with me on a trip (which, unlike most people, I don't automatically do anymore!), I grab the documents I'm likely to work on while disconnected and just keep them handy. But my heavy lifting work is all done on my virtual desktop. I can even print to any printer in any Sun office around the world from wherever I am.

The second item is around installing complicated software on my personal machine. I don't have a Sun issued laptop, I instead use my personal machine when I have to work offline. However, I don't want to have to own a particular type of machine in order to get support from my employer and I certainly don't want to install the specific anti-virus program IT issues or install a bunch of other software tools on my home computer. The wonderful thing about a virtual desktop environment is that IT can manage the environment I work in, but I can manage the access to that environment. So my personal computer stays that way.

Sun VDI Software 2.0 includes the Sun Virtual Desktop Connector, as well as components that provide secure, high performance access from Sun Ray clients and nearly any computer with a Java technology-enabled web browser. If you haven't had a chance to read up on it, please head over to the product page and have a look or download the software and try it for yourself. There's also a really informational step by step guide available. Enjoy!

Posted at 12:21AM Mar 18, 2008 by Chris in Sun  |