The Promise of Desktop Virtualization

The desktop virtualization market is booming. Business Management speaks to IDC’s Michael Rose to discover why IT management should be looking to desktop virtualization to improve ROI, consolidate applications and increase performance.

“The big advantage of desktop virtualization is that it can allow you to build the kind of model that can scale”
-Michael Rose

According to IDC, spending on virtualization software and services is expected to exceed $15 billion worldwide by 2011, up from $6.5 billion in 2006, and the desktop virtualization market alone will make up a staggering $2 billion of that total. With the market growing at such an exponential rate, what specific advantages does desktop virtualization offer? "It's a complicated question," explains Michael Rose, Research Analyst for IDC's Enterprise Virtualization Software Program. "There are a couple of limitations specific to desktop virtualization, however, when you use it in specific use cases, such as to consolidate images and applications and move to more of an on-demand terminal type of computing model, what we found in our research is that specific operational costs associated with desktop management can be quite drastically reduced in the ROI associated with moving to a desktop virtualization model."

Cost is obviously a key strategic factor in the uptake of desktop virtualization, however, some companies are still finding it hard to calculate the cost benefits of the emerging technology. Rose advises businesses look to a couple of factors. Firstly he suggests that IT organizations currently do not necessarily take into consideration all of the cost components of their desktop environment, for example power consumption. "When most desktop managers do an ROI study they don't consider power consumption because it's not part of their budget - they're not paying for power so they don't care. But even things that are more directly related to the business, such as costs associated with user downtime, can be almost entirely eliminated with desktop virtualization. A lot of factors aren't taken into consideration that can have a significant saving for the business, maybe not for the direct expense of IT but in terms of enabling business value, it's a key tool" says Rose.

Secondly, Rose highlights that one of the problems that IT organizations have when they think about desktop virtualization is the perception that there will be significant capital investment required up front, particularly in today's environment with limited budgets and access to capital. However, he believes that there are things that organizations can do in terms of how they architect a platform in order to address many of those costs. By moving to a completely standardized desktop environment without any user customization for example, it allows the company to scale down and more to a more terminal type of computing model, while continuing to enable full user flexibility. "The really big advantage of desktop virtualization over terminal services is that it can allow you to build the kind of model that can scale," adds Rose.

Beyond cost challenges, desktop virtualization can address other challenges that IT departments are currently facing, particularly around management and security. "Instead of managing a bunch of fully independent physical PCs with completely unique operating systems, such as applications and user data, you can move to a completely centralized model where you can build and move to one standardized OS images and one set of applications that can be managed," says Rose. "That one stack can be managed as a whole diverse set of users accessing that one stack, and that really goes a long way in simplifying PC lifecycle management in terms of patching, OS migrations, all that stuff. So it's really about the operational improvements and server-based computing platforms."

While there appear to be a whole host of reasons for adopting desktop virtualization, there are a number of reasons that mean integrating the technology into the business may not be so simple; Rose cites traditional IT challenges and immature technology as the main reasons. However, it seems that all is not lost. While desktop virtualization has been around for some time, it is only now that some of the basic requirements are being fulfilled so that it is possible to move between the OS image and replicate images off of that one standard OS. "There are some basic need-to-have's in order to make virtualization really usable for most organizations, a lot of things need to happen around improved performance and profile management enablement. But we've come a long way and the products that are out there today, the VMware viewers and desktop products, provide a decent set of capabilities that could actually enable an organization to adopt desktop virtualization as a technology within their organization."

In terms of the traditional internal IT challenges, Rose believes that it is necessary for an IT organization to think about desktops differently when they are thinking about implementing desktop virtualization, which requires a big change in terms of who owns control of what. Many IT managers are reluctant to give up control of their environment to server admins and are opposed to working with them and the virtualization team every time they want to instigate a change, mainly because it adds an extra layer of complexity. "It really is a complete revolution in the way you think about desktop management," explains Rose. "And as a result of that it can be very difficult to adopt innovation that has absolutely nothing to do with technology."

Indeed, desktop virtualization involves a complete change in management style and model, and to large extent means throwing away the old way of doing things. Rose points to the traditional desktop management model that has been around since the mid 1990s: "For about 15 years we have been doing things a certain way. Thinking about managing a PC through its lifecycle a certain way, best practices have been built up over the years, really entrenched within IT. And now you have virtualization - a new technology that is ultimately limited - that is saying that you now need to think about desktop management completely differently, that you need to think about this centralized image management model and a desegregation of the application and user setting and managing separate tiers within a stack. That is completely about-face and that it not like trying to move enterprise IT management, it's like trying to move the Titanic, and it is just going to take a very long time."

So, just what should we expect from desktop virtualization in the next five years? Well, Rose believes that while the technology will be a lot closer in two years, there is always a lag in terms of adoption. "If you look five years out, there's no question in my mind that desktop virtualization will be an integral part of desktop management," says Rose. "It's going to have very high levels of penetration across IT organizations in terms of adoption but in terms of the amount of users to whom it's deployed, it will probably still be very small." Rose goes on to explain that he does not think the figure of users will go up in the future mainly due to the technological limitations associated with the architecture that will limit the use to a purely tactical solution. "However, in the long run, probably in the next six to 12 months you'll start seeing solutions that enable desktop virtualization to move out from the server based computing realm and into the distributed computing realm. So you'll have some kind of virtual machine capability on your local PC that allows you to do local execution and run your computer like normal, but it will still allow IT management to manage that in a centralized manner. So you can still move to a consolidated set of applications and take all of those benefits associated with desktop virtualization and extend that out to be deployed across the entire organization, which centralized desktop virtualization, as it exists today, will never be able to do."

Top 10: Best practices for desktop virtualization

1. Deployment planning: Target particular areas one by one to gain understanding on how to support the new environment

2. Evaluate thin clients: Keep in mind the software footprint of the device

3. Change your processes: Processes will change, don't forget to train your helpdesk on troubleshooting

4. Prepare desktop technicians: Their job will change and they will have to know how to use the new software

5. Admin separation: Keep the management of the server infrastructure separate from the management of virtual desktops

6. Server infrastructure: The virtual desktops will be running on a server farm that needs to be HA enabled. If one desktop goes down, it could take out a whole number

7. Marketing plan: Develop a marketing plan to sell virtual technology to users

8. Corporate security: Determine security policy and have it built into the solution, it will minimize rework later

9. Multimedia: Thin clients aren't there yet with multimedia, it's best to leave high-end users with their desktops for this application

10. Work from home: There are design considerations that can be made up front that make enablement of the virtual desktop through the internet easier later on

Source: Baseline