Citrix XenServer

Burton Group: XenServer 5.5 is enterprise-ready

You may remember that back in February, the Burton Group released a hypervisor comparison report. And in that report, the only hypervisor to meet 100% of the firm’s required criteria for enterprise readiness was VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5.

(If you don’t remember, you can check out a full recap in our recent list of the top 10 server virtualization news stories of the year so far.)

Anyway, since February — but before we published that list — something changed. Another hypervisor has since met 100% of the Burton Group’s criteria. And that hypervisor is Citrix XenServer 5.5.

Mobile virtualization management: Valuable but not sexy

There’s been a lot of talk about mobile phone virtualization lately, thanks to the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) and the Citrix Receiver.

These new products hold a lot of promise. But for now, the best application of mobile phone virtualization is to use mobile devices to manage existing virtual environments. The latest release in this area of the market comes from Hyper9, which yesterday unveiled its Virtualization Mobile Manager (VMM).

Continued »

Still mulling over a Greene-less VMware

It’s been covered to death, but something about Diane Greene’s ousting from VMware’s top spot still doesn’t sit right with me. Not the ousting itself but the chatter about why. There have been conversations about why she was let go, ranging from EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci wanting greater control of VMware to questions about whether she was more of a technology person and less of a business person. In the end, the appointment of Paul Maritz is the really big news, at least in my not-so-humble opinion.

It goes back to “it’s not what but who you know,” and Maritz knows Microsoft. He knows Ballmer, Gates and every other player there. He was one of the most influential and instrumental executives in Microsoft’s history. His reach is wide when it comes to pulling people into the fold — not necessarily by bringing ex-Microsoft folks in as employees, but rather by having high-level working relationships with all the partners that Microsoft has worked with and that EMC and VMware have worked with or would love to work with. He also knows the PC Revolution firsthand, having seen the rise and fall of Novell’s NetWare, Banyan’s VINES and the host of minis and mains that these replaced, only to be replaced by Windows a few years later.

Tucci also knows Microsoft — EMC’s storage products center around the Microsoft world as much as any other operating system. Exchange data stores, SQL databases, file shares — all of these are EMC’s bread and butter in selling storage to the modern data center. Its software, even though some products compete (like Documentum versus Sharepoint PS), is built around a Windows-centric world.

Then there’s the history — Microsoft knows how to win. It buys what it can’t make on its own, then drowns the competition in price wars and advertising battles. Novell, once Microsoft’s bitter rival for network OS sales, now sells Linux licenses to Microsoft. Netscape is gone and the ghost of its second cousin twice removed, the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, lives on to take what is really an insignificant chunk of Internet Explorer’s market share. Corel/Novell WordPerfect? Only if you’re working in a huge law firm will you see WP on an enterprise level.

Put these together and the fabled VMware versus Microsoft Hypervisor war starts to look less like an armed conflict between bitter rivals and more like a strategic partnership built through a demonstration of independence. Tucci’s no fool — Maritz is there for the day that the Redmond giant comes knocking. He’s there to build thin but sturdy roads between the two companies. He’s there to forge something like the Citrix/Microsoft alliance, where Citrix is an independent company but still acts in many ways like a subsidiary of Microsoft (or at least an extension). In Martiz’s VMworld keynote speech (not the parts about having “sins to atone for” in his early days of programming for the PC Revolution), he barely mentioned Greene and hardly touched on competition with Microsoft. He’s looking forward to the day when he can do what only Citrix has managed to do so far — preserve independence while under Redmond’s all-seeing eye.

In the end, we’ll see VMware’s VDC-OS as the dominant force in the virtualization space with Hyper-V as an acceptable but lesser alternative, much like Citrix’s MetaFrame/XenApp and Microsoft’s Terminal Services. I think this leaves one question: In the long run, what happens to Citrix now that it’s betting so heavily on Xen and taking on Microsoft and VMware directly in the systems virtualization market?

Microsoft’s Hyper-V bundling with Windows Server 2008: Deja vu?

You may recall the 1998 anti-trust case in which Microsoft Corp. was sued by the U.S. for bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system, because doing so gave Microsoft an advantage that led to the demise of the incumbent Web browser, Netscape Navigator.

Fast-forward 10 years to today. Microsoft bundles its Hyper-V hypervisor with Windows Server 2008, so anyone who uses Windows Server 2008 also gets Hyper-V.

Is this déjà vu?

Just for fun, let’s play a little game. In the Wikipedia definition of United States v. Microsoft, let’s replace “Web browser” with “hypervisor,” “Netscape” with “VMware,” and “Internet Explorer” with “Hyper-V.”

Here we go:

United States v. Microsoft 87 F. Supp. 2d 30 (D.D.C. 2000) was a set of consolidated civil actions filed against Microsoft Corp. on May 18, 1998 by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and twenty U.S. states. Joel I. Klein was the lead prosecutor. The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power in its handling of operating system sales and hypervisor sales. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Hyper-V hypervisor software with its Microsoft Windows operating system.

Bundling them together is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft’s victory in the hypervisor wars as every Windows user had a copy of Hyper-V. It was further alleged that this unfairly restricted the market for competing hypervisors (such as VMware Inc.) that were slow to download over a modem or had to be purchased at a store.

Underlying these disputes were questions over whether Microsoft altered or manipulated its application programming interfaces (APIs) to favor Hyper-V over third-party hypervisors, Microsoft’s conduct in forming restrictive licensing agreements with OEM computer manufacturers, and Microsoft’s intent in its course of conduct.

Microsoft stated that the merging of Microsoft Windows and Hyper-V was the result of innovation and competition, that the two were now the same product and were inextricably linked together and that consumers were now getting all the benefits of IE for free. Those who opposed Microsoft’s position countered that the hypervisor was still a distinct and separate product which did not need to be tied to the operating system, since a separate version of Hyper-V was available for Mac OS. They also asserted that IE was not really free because its development and marketing costs may have kept the price of Windows higher than it might otherwise have been. The case was tried before U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. The DOJ was initially represented by David Boies.

That was fun. Just a game, of course.

But it appears to me that by bundling Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has the same advantage over VMware, Citrix and any other hypervisor provider that it had over Netscape Navigator in the 1990s.

This time around, Microsoft is probably safe from a lawsuit, though.

According to Wikipedia, “On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies. … However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future. … Nine states and the District of Columbia did not agree with the settlement, arguing that it did not go far enough to curb Microsoft’s anti-competitive business practices. On June 30, 2004, the U.S. appeals court unanimously approved the settlement with the Justice Department, rejecting objections from Massachusetts that the sanctions were inadequate.”

I’m not saying that what happened to Netscape will happen to VMware. In the virtualization market, VMware is in a strong position with a huge lead over Microsoft, and VMware’s products are far more mature and feature-rich. Hell, Microsoft doesn’t even offer live migration yet.

But some analysts predict that history will repeat itself.

I hope all the existing hypervisor vendors can co-exist. It gives users choice and keeps costs down, as we saw when both Citrix and VMware reduced their hypervisor prices to zero this year.

I’d like to hear your feedback on the virtualization industry and whether you think VMware can maintain its position as industry leader.

VMware defends its upcoming fault-tolerance feature

During VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas last week, VMware Inc. announced its upcoming fault tolerance feature and gave a demonstration of it during one of the keynote sessions. It looked pretty good and simple to use, but Littleton, Mass.-based Marathon Technologies Corp., a company that specializes in fault tolerance software, had plenty to say otherwise.

In response to Marathon’s blog dissin’ the upcoming feature, Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware’s Mike DePetrillo, a principal systems engineer, wrote a blog defending VMware Fault Tolerance.

For starters, Marathon complained that VMware does not provide component-level fault tolerance. “The most common failures that result in unplanned downtime are component failures such as storage, NIC [network interface card] or controller failures. Yet VMware Fault Tolerance doesn’t do anything to protect against I/O, storage or network failures.”

DePetrillo noted that VMware already has features to protect again component failure. “If your NIC fails you’ve got NIC teaming built into the system. To set it up simply plug in both NICs to the server, go into the network panel and attach both of them to the same virtual switch. Done. Four clicks. Same thing for storage with the built-in SAN [storage area network] multipathing drivers,” DePetrillo wrote. “I absolutely agree with the author that component failures are the cause of most crashes and that’s why VMware added these features in 2002. VMware FT is not designed for component failure because there’s no sense in moving the VM to another host if you’ve simply lost a NIC uplink. NIC teaming will take care of that with ease and is a LOT cheaper than using CPU and memory resources on another host to overcome the failure.”

Marathon’s second beef: VMware’s fault tolerance is too complex. “In order to use VMware Fault Tolerance, you’ll first have to install both VMware HA [High Availability] and DRS [Distributed Resource Scheduler]. No small feat in and of themselves. Then, because VMware FT requires NIC teaming, you’ll also have to manually install paired NICs. Then you’ll need to manually set up dual storage controllers (with the software to manage them) because it requires multipathing. And to top it all off, you’re required to use an expensive, and often complicated, SAN.”

DePetrillo said the process requires checking off two boxes - HA and DRS. That’s it. “If that’s too hard then please comment and let me know how it could possibly be easier. Even my dog has figured out how to do this now. Granted, it’s a pretty smart dog.”

“As for setting up the dual NICs and dual HBAs [host bus adapters], well, yes, you have to actually plug the physical devices in. After you’ve done that the **built-in** NIC teaming and HBA drivers will take over and configure most everything for you. The NIC teaming does require four extra clicks. The HBA drivers actually figure out the failover paths, match them up, and set up the appropriate form of failover all auto-magically. They’ve been doing this since ESX 1.5 (6 years ago),” DePetrillo blogged.

“Lastly, yes, this requires shared storage. Pretty sure that most environments that want FT (no downtime what-so-ever because our business could lose millions) already have a SAN to take advantage of other things virtualization related such as DRS and VMotion,” he wrote.

Also, VMware FT does not require dual NICs or dual HBAs because, DePetrillo said, “This is something you should have in every virtualization setup that’s running VMs you care anything about, but it’s not a requirement to get VMware FT [Fault Tolerance] running.”

The last point Marathon makes that’s worth spending any time on is that VMware  offers onlylimited CPU fault tolerance. “With VMware FT, you’ll need to set up what VMware refers to as a “record/replay” capability on both a primary and secondary server. If something happens to the primary server, the record is stored on the SAN and then restarted on the secondary server. … The whole thing depends on the quality of the SAN. Second, in the words of the VMware engineer who presented at VMworld, “this can take a couple of seconds.” So what happens to your application state in those couple of seconds?”

DePetrillo’s defense is that “if you’re the type of company that requires absolutely no downtime for an app — if the app is just that critical — then I’m pretty sure you’re going to have a decent SAN. … If you’re having so many problems with your SAN that you don’t trust it for FT, then you have much bigger issues at hand that VMware or Marathon or any of the other virtualization related vendors aren’t going to help you with.”

You can read more of VMware’s comments on DePetrillo’s blog, which gets into some details on how VMware Fault Tolerance will work, and vice versa for Marathon.

But I think it is obvious that Marathon is making VMware’s fault tolerance feature seem worse than it is, and VMware is making its new feature seem simpler than it is.

For the most part, this is a pissing contest between the incumbent fault-tolerance vendor and the “new guy,” but the fact of the matter is, if you use VMware virtualization, you can’t use Marathon Technologies because they don’t support VMware (obviously) and if you use Citrix Systems’ XenServer, you can’t use VMware Fault Tolerance, so these arguments are moot.

BMC intros slew of virtualization management products

Houston-based BMC Software introduced several new virtualization management products today, including nine new integrated offerings designed to eliminate the risk and operational expenses associated with management of virtualized data centers.

BMC’s new virtualization management products are fully integrated with virtualization products from Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and VMware Inc. The new BMC software is based on an automated set of closed-loop change and configuration management (CLCCM) process workflows that reduce the latency, cost and risk associated with change management. All of the new offerings support both virtual and physical infrastructures.

The nine new offerings support goals for performance, compliance and enterprise visibility by addressing the challenges created by virtualization.

Some of the issues addressed include the following:

*Planning a virtualization/consolidation initiative: BMC Virtualization Capacity Management and Planning Service is a packaged services offering that helps customers accelerate their virtualization efforts.

*Simplifying management: BMC Performance Management does complete performance monitoring across virtual infrastructure and applications with enhanced VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMotion support.

*Ensuring availability: BMC Application Performance and Analytics helps IT actively manage service levels in virtual infrastructures.

*Performance: BMC Capacity Management replaces educated guesses with automatic assessment, prioritization of server workloads, and ongoing capacity monitoring. The result is high performance while reducing capital and operational expenses and maximizing server consolidation.

*Server sprawl: Virtualization allows new servers to be created very rapidly, leading to virtual machine (VM) sprawl. BMC Discovery Solution helps customers keep virtualized environments under control by keeping tabs on virtual servers. Support for VMware, Solaris 9/10 containers and zones, AIX LPARS as well as z/VM dependencies on mainframe (z/OS) mean that all types of virtual servers can be discovered and added to BMC Atrium CMDB.

*VM security: BMC BladeLogic Virtualization Module for Servers adds security and strengthens licensing and regulatory compliance. It includes automatic provisioning and configuration of the entire software stack, including virtual infrastructure, guest VMs and applications, and enforces security best practices, including built-in virtual server hardening rules.

*Compliance: BMC BladeLogic Operations Management Suite establishes automated, closed-loop change and configuration governance over entire virtualized environments. BMC’s policy-driven configuration control prohibits noncompliant servers from being deployed or existing beyond the next audit scan. Automated compliance and remediation capabilities detect and correct any compliance violations.

*Administration costs: BMC Run Book Automation Platform and BMC Run Book Automation VMware Adapter exploit BMC’s CLCCM workflows to automate routine change management tasks.

Of course, BMC isn’t the only game in town when it comes to virtual infrastructure management. There are a number of vendors offering management products for various purposes, including Portsmouth, N.H.-based vKernel and San Francisco-based Hyperic, Inc.

In addition, Austin, Texas-based Surgient announced today its Virtual Automation Platform 6.0, which is designed with physical provisioning and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V support to manage virtual resources and eliminate physical server and virtual machine (VM) sprawl.

In addition to third-party VM management products, virtualization providers offer their own; VMware sells a proprietary management and automation suite, as does Microsoft for Hyper-V.

Xen version 3.3 enhances performance, scalability to open source hypervisor

Xen.org announced the release of a new version of the project’s open source hypervisor, Xen 3.3 today, with enhancements to security, performance and scalability.

The release is now available for download from the Xen.org community site and is the product of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 hardware, software, and security vendors.

The new Xen 3.3 release provides users with the new features including:

* Power management in the hypervisor
* Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) emulation domains for better scalability, performance and security
* Shadow pagetable improvements for the best HVM performance ever
* Hardware Assisted Paging enhancements
* Device passthrough enhancements
* CPUID feature levelling that allows safe domain migration across systems with different CPU models (within the same vendor brand - Intel or AMD)

Xen 3.3 provides virtualization for x64, IA64 and ARM-based platforms, and through close links with CPU and chipset vendors in the Xen project, Xen 3.3 also supports the latest hardware virtualization enhancements, like Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel-VT).

With Xen’s memory ballooning feature, the hypervisor can reallocate memory between guest Virtual Machines (VMs) to guarantee performance and allow greater density of VMs per server. Xen 3.3 also offers CPU portability to allow live migration of VMs across different CPUs, active power optimization to reduce server power consumption, and significant security enhancements.

Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems, said in a statement, “In just two years, Xen has rapidly gained share in virtualization, much as Linux did in operating systems - and in the same period Xen has driven the price of competing hypervisors to zero, allowing any vendor to include virtualization for free.”

In addition to its growing development community, Xen hypervisor is the standard virtualization platform used by cloud computing providers like Amazon.com. It is also used in virtualization products from Citrix (XenServer), Fujitsu, Novell, Oracle (Oracle VM), Sun Microsystems (Sun xVM), and Virtual Iron, and is available as an embedded option in many x86 servers.

Symantec, Citrix take on VMware with block storage management product

On Monday, June 9, Symantec Corp. of Cupterino, Calif., announced the release of Veritas Virtual Infrastructure (VxVI), a server and storage virtualization product built on Citrix Systems Inc.’s XenServer technology. By exploiting Veritas’ block storage management model, VxVI hopes to compete with VMware-Infrastructure-3-in-production environments by offering increased capabilities for storage and availability-critical systems.

The new Xen-based virtual infrastructure platform from Symantec provides storage management and high availability with cross-platform connectivity for the virtual data center. It’s essentially XenServer with the Veritas storage management layer on top — all wrapped in a Symantec management console.

According to Symantec Senior Vice President of Storage and Availability Management Rob Soderbery, the time is right for a product that addresses the needs of testing and development, needs that have been underserved by VMware. “Users understand the storage management challenges with VMware,” he said. Symantec has delivered something “fundamentally new” in how server virtualization works with storage management, he noted.

The key difference between VMware and Veritas is in how each handles virtual machines (VMs). Soderbery argues that the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) file-based system that VMware uses can’t compete with the block storage system of Veritas VxVI.

As enterprises build out the x86 data center, Symantec’s product seeks to serve those who want to bring physical capabilities into the virtual environment. Veritas Virtual Infrastructure brings dynamic storage layouts, enclosure and array mirroring and storage-area network (SAN) multipathing/load balancing to server virtualization, adding features such as shared VM boot images with which Symantec hopes to lure VMware customers that are not satisfied with the storage capabilities of the leading server virtualization platform. 

Soderbery says that VxVI will work well with Microsoft’s forthcoming Xen-inspired hypervisor, Hyper-V. “Microsoft has done something pretty interesting here in being open to the Xen community and encouraging the Xen community to be open with Microsoft,” says Soderbery. “Veritas Virtual Infrastructure is technology that we can apply across the Xen ecosystem and Hyper-V as well.”

With another Xen-based virtualization product on the market engineered to be more compatible with the forthcoming Hyper-V, VMware may feel the pinch as users see more options with the other big players in the server virtualization market. But will the $4,595 per two-socket server for Veritas discourage VMware users from even running a demo?

What do you think? If you plan on deploying Veritas VxVI, we want to hear from you. Send us your thoughts via email.

Hyper-V could benefit from VMware’s Xen-based competition

If Hyper-V doesn’t convert the VMware faithful as soon as Microsoft makes its hypervisor generally available later this year, it may get a little help from its friends: Xen-based virtualization platforms.

Some like IT consultant Ardalan Dlawar believe that Microsoft will leverage support for Xen-based platforms to increase competition with VMware. “And Xen will have more third-party support and fewer compatibility issues,” according to Dlawar.

Despite user arguments that ;Hyper-V will have to deliver more than a lower price tag to win users, Hyper-V will certainly get consideration from many VMware customers. While organizations want to maximize their VMware investment, especially enterprise customers which deploy tens or hundreds of VMware virtual machines, Hyper-V evals will most likely be deployed, according to Andi Mann, the research director at Boulder, Colo.-based Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

Based on a survey of more than 600 enterprises, EMA found about 30% of enterprises have already planned a Hyper-V deployment even with Hyper-V’s general availability several months away. In addition, Microsoft is actually within 10% of VMware in current and planned enterprise deployments according to EMA’s data. Also consider this EMA finding: Xen-based platforms already account for more than 40% of current or planned deployments, the data suggests that the market demand for VMware alternatives won’t disappear.

“VMware is still way out in front in server virtualization,” said Mann, “but both Microsoft and Citrix Systems are definitely catching up.”

Of course, VMware and Microsoft aren’t the only options available. As managers continue utilizing toolsets available from Xen-based products such as Citrix’s XenServer and Virtual Iron Software, VMware and Microsoft are both working on tool sets that enable users manage their virtualization counterparts respectively.

“Both VMware and Microsoft understand that they are not going to be the only players on the market, they recognize that customers are leveraging their competitors’ technology in different parts of their businesses,” according to Adnan Hindi, the VP of operations at ScienceLogic in Reston, Va. Hindi said that companies like his, which produces cross-platform appliances, will benefit from multiple-platform virtual landscapes. As shops continue to see benefit in the utilities that Xen-based products offer, Hindi sees a universal virtualization tool set ultimately working itself out; these tools would essentially equalize platforms in the market and dilute decision making in choosing a virtualization platform largely down to cost.

Over the past year, there’s been a lot of talk about VMware’s cost of VMware. But the price of VMware Server is right for small businesses, said Brett Riale, an IT consultant in Pittsburgh, who feels “truly blessed that programs as functional as VMware Server have been released for free.” Riale is hesitant to trust another Microsoft virtualization product after “the debacle” that was Virtual Server 2005. “Unless it absolutely outperforms VMware,” Riale said that he won’t consider Hyper-V in the near future. And Dave Baughman, a systems administrator for Muncie, Ind.-based Ontario Systems, thinks that his ESX system is “a consistent platform” and that the price of support is worth their investment. “Most of the cost is for support and (VMware’s) support is very good,” says Baugham.

But what will happen when all the Microsoft customers with enterprise agreements get a taste of Hyper-V support? Or if Microsoft offers more third-party support for Xen?

Howard Holton, a system engineer, said that market share will shift in Hyper-V’s favor.

“Hyper-V is an excellent solution for many of those that cannot afford the steep cost that ESX server requires,” says Holton, who has already has a positive experience working with the release candidate and points out that for most data center operations, VMotion’s High Availability (HA) is overkill. ”Hyper-V fits into the market below VMware for hosts that do not need true HA.” 

Holton said that in the long run Hyper-V might win out over VMware because Citrix’s XenServer has finally given Xen a roadmap. XenServer is the spoiler, with a lower TCO than VMware. Although price hasn’t deterred Holton from delivering VMware to his customers in the past, he predicted that Hyper-V will only increase in value.

“As a value-added reseller in the small to midsized space, VMware is the leading virtualization product that I offer. That is changing.”

VMware pushes desktop virtualization on management and security benefits

VMware Inc. Senior Director of Enterprise Desktops Gerald Chen visited our office on Tuesday morning to discuss the different types of desktop virtualization and answer common questions about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), for example, how it differs from terminal services and cost issues.

Here’s how VDI works: each end user gets a virtual machine (VM) that is deployed from a server in the data center directly to a PC, laptop or thin client computer. Each VM is customizable, so all of the user’s settings are saved and re-booted each time the user signs in, Chen said.

When a user logs off for the day, their VM goes idle, and wakes back up when the user logs into their system again, according to Chen. Chen believes that the advantage of VDI is that sensitive data is not being stored on desktops, which can easily be lost or stolen, and these virtual desktops are easier to manage than physical ones.

“VDI is great for industries like health care that are really concerned about information security and compliance. The real value though, is in management. All of the information is safe in the data center, and centrally managed through Virtual Infrastructure,” Chen said. “For instance, if you have 100 new employees who need desktops, you can deploy a VM for each of them in just minutes, and manage all of them centrally.”

VDI is different from Sever Based Computing (SBC) systems like Citrix Systems Inc.’s XenApp in that VDI is connects a single user to a single operating system (OS), instead of having multiple users share one OS.

“Not every application likes to share an OS, and there is also bad isolation; if one application crashes, everyone sharing that OS crashes as well. Those desktops can’t be customized either. It is a locked environment.”

Chen went on to explain that with VDI, four to ten VMs per server core are supported, so a server with one quad-core processor can, theoretically, house 40 VMs. Of course, that varies depending on things like workload, applications and memory. If the VMs become too heavy for the server to handle, management features in VI3 intervene. VMotion can move live VMs from one server to another when capacity issues arise, as can Dynamic Resource Scheduler, which allocates and balances computing resources as needed using VMotion.

Desktop virtualization case study
As VMware announced customer case studies in February, including one at Huntsville Hospital in Huntsville, Alabama.

The hospital needed to implement a new medical information application throughout its network while protecting HIPAA-related data. Deploying hosted desktops on VMware, the hospital could lock down sensitive patient data and reduce the cost and complexity of desktop management.

They used combinations of thin clients and blade servers to access the centralized virtual desktops, and in turn, reduced power consumption across the hospital by 78%, improved longevity with lower hardware maintenance needs and made wireless thin clients on wheeled carts available to hospital staff. Also, doctors can remotely access their VMs through the Internet using a web browser when necessary.

The downside to desktop virtualization
While the benefits are clear, there are some downsides to desktop virtualization: extra storage and initial cost.

Chen told SearchServerVirtualization.com that VMware is working on reducing image sizes and has designed a way to keep only one copy of files that are identical among many users, like icons and other graphics, to reduce the amount of storage necessary.

The cost of implementing desktop virtualization turns users off. According to Ars Open Forum blogger ‘Bright Wire,’ the cost and the magnitude of system upgrades required is not worth the benefits.

“The cost of deploying virtual desktops is massive,” Bright Wire wrote. “You will need to re-gear your existing desktops to run the virtual or you will need vendor equipment that costs twice as much as a new desktop. Either way, the cost is big in manpower. On top of that, your infrastructure will need serious review.”

According to VMware’s product specifications, local desktop virtualization requires a 500 MHz or faster processor with recommended 256 MB of memory, though Forrester reports that PCs must be faster and have more RAM to work efficiently.

“In addition you need to look into the server infrastructure,” Bright Wire said. “You are talking about needing a lot of iron on the backside to handle the needs of the server to supply two to 16 desktops. All this adds up quickly and can easily swamp a datacenter.”

As for pricing complaints, VMware is used to hearing them and holds firm to the ‘you get what you pay for’ mantra, saying the management benefits are worth the price.

The company charges $150 per concurrent user plus additional costs for support, either Gold or Platinum levels. Both bundles include VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition for VDI (which consists of VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5) and the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2. The VMware VDI Starter Edition, which enables 10 virtual desktops, has a list price of $1,500. The VMware VDI Bundle 100 Pack, which enables 100 virtual desktops, has a list price of $15,000.

The market indicates a demand for desktop virtualization, as a number of other vendors also entered the desktop virtualization space including Sun Microsystems Inc., Citrix., Pano Logic Inc. and Symantec. Chen would argue that many customers come for reduction in hardware but stay for the management applications.

“Reducing hardware costs is not a reason to use VDI, it is management. We have customers who have seen 40% to 50% ROI in terms of management costs and the amount of time it frees up.”