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The delivery of desktop services from a virtual PC estate within the data centre is a core ambition of many IT organisations

In the quarter of a century since the PC first colonised the corporate desktop, organisations like Bracknell Forest Borough Council have developed an uncomplicated approach to refreshing their end-user IT service delivery platforms.

Every five years, says Richard Dawson, Bracknell Forest’s IT services manager, the Borough has reviewed its desktop needs, and every five years it has created a new “middling” performance PC specification and placed an order with a reliable vendor at the best price it can find.

This year however, Dawson, believes the time may have come when optimising the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Bracknell Forest’s IT user systems may require something more radical than simply replacing tired old PCs with shiny new ones.

“I believe we are at a crossroads at the moment in terms of the way we deploy desktops and traditional desktop technology,” he said. “We currently have 1,400 Intel-based machines from Dell, and we have £300,000 set aside to replace 500 of those desktops in the traditional way - taking out 500 old machines and putting in 500 new ones.”

“But, we’re now really questioning whether this is the right way to go. We know we don’t really need to deploy a fat, £600 PC to everyone’s desktop, because nobody uses all of its capabilities. The management of that device is getting more complex and that’s not to mention the power that they use and the CO2 they produce as well.”

Consequently, although no final decision has been made about what to do with the council’s £300,000 PC budget, Dawson is already convinced that simply following the habit of 20 years is no longer appropriate.

“Without making any rash decisions, we know that doing what we’ve always done isn’t the right thing to do. It just puts us in the same place we were five years ago, and spending that amount of public money in that way isn’t right either,” he says.

“So, we’re trying to review [what we do] and change our focus. We’re looking at how we can change things by using thin-client technology and desktop virtualisation.”

Death of a model?

Dawson is far from being the only IT professional to be thinking this way.

Indeed, although desktop virtualisation has so far been overshadowed by the extraordinary success that Intel-based virtualisation technologies have had at the server level in the data centre, there is now plenty of evidence to suggest that virtualisation is set to have an even bigger impact on the corporate desktop.

A survey of more than 700 companies conducted by the Massachusetts-based Enterprise Strategy Group in the US found that 32% them were already piloting desktop virtualisation technology of some kind – the kind of data that has prompted Gartner to predict a “mainstream” future for desktop virtualisation as early 2010, and for IDC to prophesy a $2 billion global market for desktop virtualisation software by 2011.

Among Information Age readers the evidence of change is also strong. A survey of 287 senior IT decision-makers to be published in September shows that over a third are actively considering desktop virtualisation for future deployment.

This array of forecasts suggests that there is great change afoot for the corporate desktop, including the beginning of the end for the conventional PC that has dominated it for so long. And, for many, it’s passing will not be a cause for mourning.

Indeed, although the PC remains a key element of the modern business infrastructure, it has long ceased to be perceived as a source of IT innovation and flexibility. On the contrary, at most organisations the PC is now perceived to be a problem: an unmanageable, bug-ridden, cost centre whose real lifetime cost is routinely calculated to be around 10 times its purchase price, and in some cases significantly more. As IT industry analysts 451 Group put it, today’s enterprise desktop environment is “too decentralised, the skilled labour pool [of PC support staff] is too small, application upgrades are too hard, and [the risk] to data security is too serious.”

None of this is news to today’s IT managers, of course, and nor has there really been any mystery about what broadly needs to be done to cure the ills of the modern desktop. “For 10 years now customers have realised that centrally managing the desktop is better – a more efficient and cheaper way of doing things,” says Tommy Armstrong, VMware’s desktop product manager for Europe.

The problem, he and other virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) suppliers argue, has been that conventional thin-client approaches to the recentralisation of end-user services have been too restrictive.

Systems based on Windows Terminal Services or Citrix’s ICA protocols have proven their worth in so-called ‘task-based’ environments, where workers such as call centre operatives only need access to a narrow range of relatively undemanding applications – often outperforming conventional PC-based systems by 20% to 40% in terms of cost of ownership.

However, conventional thin-client systems have been unable to cope with the exceptional requirements of the typical knowledge worker. In particular, they have failed to accommodate the personal requirements of the modern generation of PC users that frequently regards the provision of a state-of-the-art desktop as a standard element of any acceptable compensation package.

This clash of interests between the needs of IT and the demands of their users has ensured that thin-client terminals still account for less than 15% of the world’s business desktops. Now though, VDI vendors believe they have the answer, and all of the world’s 450 million business PCs are now firmly in their marketing sights.

Optimal mix

In simple terms, VDI’s proponents say that theirs is a best-of-both-worlds solution. Once a PC is converted into a virtual machine it loses all the constraints and vulnerabilities that go with dependence on a single piece of hardware, and instead gains all the advantages that go with being deployed against a set of secure, scalable and closely managed data centre resources. At the same time, unlike a conventional one-size-fits-all thin-client system, individual virtual PCs remain isolated from one another, so that the failure of one has no consequences for any others, and each virtual machine can still be configured to whatever personal specification the end-user requires.

This ought to be good news for everyone. PC administrators gain much greater control over their assets, since virtual PC images are infinitely malleable entities that can be defined, stored, configured and deployed almost as if they were documents contained in a corporate content management system. Now, it should no longer be a costly chore for IT to configure PCs to individual users’ needs.

At the same time end-users, as well as enjoying the same experience they have come to expect from their computers, also have the potential to access server-class resources, such as high-availability service levels, hardened security and even dynamic scalability. For this community, the virtual PC shouldn’t merely match the conventional experience, it ought to exceed it.

From a corporate perspective, the gains are substantial. VDI vendors claim their systems will harden security, improve service levels, accelerate new system deployment and optimise the overall use of IT assets. In many cases, says Armstrong, companies can expect to reduce the operational costs of their desktop estates by as much as 40%.

With so much in its favour, it is no surprise that organisations like Gartner and the 451 are detecting fast-growing market interest in VDI. Nor is it any surprise that vendors are rushing to ensure that they can capture a share of what promises to be a lucrative market shift. However, as with any rapidly emerging market, it seems that early adopters of desktop virtualisation would be best advised not to allow themselves to be carried away by the enthusiasm of eager suppliers.

Certainly, as well as supporting the view of vendors that desktop virtualisation has much to recommend it, analysts such as the 451 Group are careful to point that both the VDI market, and the technologies underpinning it, are very far from mature.

Six options

VMware and Citrix are currently the clear market and technology leaders providing a relatively solid platform for a fast-growing community of systems builders and resellers, encompassing giants such as IBM and HP, established centralised desktop vendors like Wyse, and a host of smaller players.

However, they are not the only game in town. Analysts at 451 Group have described at least six distinct technical approaches to desktop virtualisation developed by companies such as ClearCube, Parallels, RingCube and Teradicci. And, of course, there is still the question of when and how Microsoft will choose to accommodate or compete with these vendors with technology of its own.

But, distracting as these market uncertainties may be, they are not the chief reason why many early investors in desktop virtualisation are taking a carefully phased approach to its adoption.

At Bracknell Forest, for instance, although Richard Dawson has been encouraged by his experience of Citrix’s conventional thin-client XenApp (formerly PresentationServer) and his more limited use of the XenDesktop VDI product that Citrix acquired with XenSource last year, he is not quite ready to convert all of his 1,400 desktops into virtual machines.

Instead, Dawson plans to go ahead with “one or two pilots” to properly test Citrix’s claims for its technology, and in particular to study the real cost implications, including the licensing issues in moving from a traditional physical desktop model, to the altogether more dynamic world of the virtual PC. Based on the experiences of other virtual desktop pioneers, it will be a surprise if Dawson doesn’t find that there hidden costs to the VDI model which aren’t always highlighted by vendor marketing materials.

PC anywhere

Certainly, Andrew Gordon and Ewen Bruce, respectively senior architect for servers and senior architect for desktops with pensions company Standard Life, could give Dawson a few clues about what watch for.

Like Bracknell Forest, Standard Life believes desktop virtualisation could prove to be a valuable tool in its efforts to both reduce the operational costs of its 9,000-plus desktop estate, and to make it more manageable and responsive to changing business requirements. Accordingly, two years ago, the company set out to trial virtual desktops and, “because we like a challenge”, says Bruce, the company started by rolling out VMware-based virtual PCs to its Information Services (IS) unit.

Standard Life is blessed with what Bruce describes as a fairly standard desktop environment, so starting with the IS team, probably the company’s most demanding desktops users, was not a case of picking the low-hanging fruit first. Nevertheless, the experience, at least from the IS team’s perspective, has been a positive one.

According to Bruce, by enabling his team to capture their often highly individual and specialised desktop environments as a centrally stored virtual machine image, the company’s IS developers can now download their own personal desktop to whichever office they happen to be needed in. It has given them a new degree of mobility, says Bruce. “They are now able to go and sit and work directly alongside the business people they are supporting. We could never have expected them to do that before,” he says.

However, despite the positive user feedback to the virtual desktop trial, there are still only 300 virtual PC instances at Standard Life, and both Bruce and Gordon believe there is much to be done before they can justify expanding the virtual model. “Before we can do that we have to be able to put together a business case for it,” says Gordon, “and we’re not ready to do that today.”

Standard Life’s piloting of a virtual desktop strategy has been highly instructive on number of fronts – not least in terms of cost. Before the exercise began, says Bruce, one supplier (not VMware) had predicted that the company might realise operational savings of more than 40% from its virtual desktop experiment. But this wasn’t what happened at all.

Although Bruce’s desktop team derived plenty of benefits from moving their systems into the data centre, Gordon’s data centre team didn’t see too many benefits flowing back to them. In fact, “it actually ended up costing us money,” he says.

The lesson that Standard Life has learned, and one that other virtual desktop adopters would do well to note, is that moving commodity technology into a premium data centre environment must be done with care. In Standard Life’s case, moving 300 desktops worth of data and application logic from a set of relatively inexpensive PC disk drives to a portion of

the company’s Tier 1 storage farm is not something Gordon can afford to repeat 9,000 more times - at least, not until the

VDI vendors have perfected the storage de-duplication technology that would allow 9,000 virtual PC users to require something significantly less than 9,000 individual disk images.

Further reading

Wider options on the desktop
The front line of IT used to come in a single flavour, but the variety of configurations now possible on the desktop allows organisations to make some strategy choices

A virtual operation
How the Royal College of Physicians used virtualisation to cut its hardware requirements by four-fifths

The virtual licensing hurdle
Licensing software on virtual machines brings fresh challenges, says Gartner’s Frank DeSalvo

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