Virtualization Finds New Applications

Just a few years ago, it took Northeastern University some four to five weeks to roll out a new application to one of the more than 1000 workstations in its various campus laboratories. Today, it takes almost no time at all – any user with proper authorization can merely request the application and almost immediately begin using it. How has the education heavyweight achieved such a transformation? Step forward, application virtualization.

Before Northeastern implemented Microsoft’s SoftGrid solution in September 2005, software installation was an arduous process for the IT team. “One of the major challenges was in our student public access areas,” says Rick Mickool, Executive Director and CTO of Information Services at Northeastern. “We have over 1000 machines that we make available to the student population, and that was proving something of a challenging maintenance environment as we have to make hundreds of applications available on that Windows image.”

He explains how the problem broke down into two key areas, with the first major challenge based around DLL conflict. “To do regression testing every time we had to install a new application was very time-consuming,” he says. “With hundreds of applications, it could take between two and three weeks.” The second major challenge was one of keeping current – being able to keep each machine up-to-date with the latest patch or the latest software version. “Our virtualization solution really helped us with both DLL conflicts and the time it takes to do regression testing, and also with updates since we’re now managing it centrally and can push out those applications.”

The benefits have been significant. When a user clicks on an application for the first time, it begins downloading to the SoftGrid cache on the desktop – a feature that helps conserve bandwidth, requiring 50 percent less than when distributing an entire application at once. The traditional method of updating a user desktop requires creating a new software image and distributing it to all users at once, producing far more load on the server and the network. With the new solution, however, the load is distributed among different servers at different times, depending upon user requests. Additionally, the virtual desktop approach has reduced the load on the helpdesk, because users don’t change applications themselves; everyone uses the application exactly as it appears on the central server. Finally, software licensing provides more big savings, since SoftGrid makes it easy to see exactly who is using what applications – and for how long. “For us as an information services service group, we can respond much more quickly to new versions or new application requests because of that shortening of the regression testing cycle,” says Mickool. “That then frees us up to concentrate more fully on other aspects of our work. It just helps us manage the volume of work.”

So how did Mickool and his team go about finding the right vendor to match Northeastern’s organizational needs, and what were the key considerations in choosing the SoftGrid solution? “First we did a thorough review of the challenges that we faced and the solution we were using at that time – which at that point was primarily to ghost image the entire machine,” he says. “I think you need to start from a pretty solid base of knowing what you need and why you need it. We then instigated a comprehensive search and discovery process to find which of the various solutions available on the market could help us. At that point in time there really were not very many companies that had product in this space, but we did our research and then we contacted Softricity – then an independent company before its acquisition by Microsoft – directly. They happened to be local to the Boston area, so we were able to work with them pretty closely, piloting their solution in a portion of our lab to see how it would work.”

After a successful trial, Mickool and his team were confident enough to roll the technology out campus-wide in early-2006 – making Northeastern pretty early adopters in terms of application virtualization. Did he ever see it as something of a gamble? “We were pretty comfortable taking those calculated risks. And I think the way we introduced it, in terms of working closely with the provider, as well as not completely switching over right away, really helped us. It was a phased rollout, and we knew that we could always just re-ghost the image very quickly if we encountered any problems.”

As with any new deployment, there were a few minor teething troubles in deploying the solution. One of the main challenges was that not all of the applications could be sequenced. “What sequencing does is create a virtualized version of that application,” explains Mickool. “As part of the process you have to install the application into this virtual environment before it’s ready to be rolled out, but not all applications can be virtualized. However, in our case, this only applied to about five or six applications out of more than 120.” The second challenge is that the nature of application virtualization means that each different application runs in its own space to avoid application conflict. “But that can actually be a drawback when applications need to talk to one another,” he continues. “In some cases we needed to create what we call a ‘suite’ of applications as a workaround.”

Despite these minor issues, however, Mickool has no hesitation in recommending application virtualization to others. “We have not done any formal financial measure in terms of ROI, but we have been able to redirect some time in terms of the overall management of application delivery,” he concludes. “From a time and quality standpoint, we’ve definitely seen significant results. I believe organizations really need to look at both desktop and application virtualization. The technology is out there, and organizations just need to look to see how appropriate it is and what benefits they can get out of it.”

Virtual success

Application virtualization allows Northeastern to:

• Let users access applications and data anytime from anywhere, and share information easily by making applications and data portable
• Reduce IT administrative time previously spent setting up network shares and managing bandwidth and performance issues resulting from volumes of email attachments
• Simplify remote user support, eliminating the need to send technicians to remote campuses for updates, patches and last-minute deployments
• Accelerate application deployments, migrations, patching and upgrades by eliminating application conflicts, regression testing and installations

How it works

Each application must be ‘sequenced’ to prepare it for streaming from the SoftGrid server. Using a sequencer that comes with the product, the process is fairly simple for applications built in a modular fashion, but can take longer for larger, more monolithic applications. Once the sequencing is done, Northeastern uses Active Directory and Group Policy to make applications available to various groups. They can see what applications are available to them on their menus, just as with traditional desktops.