Desktop virtualization

VMware View demo bombs on poor bandwidth

SAN FRANCISCO — I attended a session at VMworld 2009 today demonstrating VMware View and its cost saving value to the enterprise, but the only thing it really proved was how important proper bandwidth is for desktop virtualization.

The session, called “VMware View – Evangelizing the Value Proposition,” was a hands-on workshop using 46 Wyse thin client desktops running VMware View. The point of the session was to let attendees run the Web-based VMware TCO/ROI Calculator using VMware View, so we could see how much money desktop virtualization can save while experiencing VMware View at the same time.

Unfortunately, the bandwidth in that room was less than adequate, and thus, so was the performance. For instance, the TCO/ROI calculator prompts for your company name, type, location, etc. After entering the data, the system took a minute or more to process it, and moving from one page to the next was agonizingly slow. Not good.

As we all sat waiting for our systems to process simple requests, the poor session host, VMware’s Director of Enterprise Marketing, Bob Stephens, had to present on the benefits of desktop virtualization, such as reduced administration costs, better security, easier management and higher availability than traditional PCs. Stephens reiterated that the bandwidth in the room was “horrible” and said the performance was not indicative of what VMware View is actually like.

Later on I chatted with David Bieneman, the CEO and Founder of Liquidware Labs, which offers desktop virtualization diagnostic tools. I told him about the snafu during that session, and he said a safe bet for bandwidth is 200 kbits per user and under 200 milliseconds of latency. The sad performance could also have been due to a bandwidth connection issue to or from VMware’s ROI/CTO Calculator Tool server, he said.

Unfortunately, the session was full of potential customers who now have a bad taste in their mouth about desktop virtualization. By a show of hands, all the attendees in the room said they use VMware, but only one or two use desktop virtualization already. The IT administrator from a University sitting beside me wasn’t using desktop virtualization, and was less than impressed with what he saw. From what I could tell, other attendees felt the same way.

The takeaway here is that if you don’t have the right networking infrastructure for virtualized desktops, your end users will notice a difference, and they will complain. What’s worse, the time they spend waiting for their systems to respond translates into lower productivity, and it takes away from the savings you could gain in other areas.

Citrix looks outside for help with client hypervisor

Last week, Citrix Systems discussed Project Independence and its plan to develop a Xen bare metal client hypervisor for Intel’s Centrino and Core 2 Duo chips, the same chips that power the world’s desktops and laptops. Now, the company has announced that it is joining hands with venture capital firms Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners to take a minority stake in Virtual Computer of Westford, Mass.

You may remember reading in this blog about Virtual Computer, whose NxTop PC management suite relies on a — surprise!! — Xen client hypervisor. But don’t think for a minute think that Citrix is paying Virtual Computer to do its development dirty work. “We’re not doing the investment in VCI so that they can build our client hypervisor for Intel,” said Andy Cohen, Citrix senior director of strategic development. Rather, the investment has more to do with the relative dearth of Xen experts in this world. “There’s are only so many really smart Xen guys in the world,” Cohen said, and one of them — Virtual Computer’s CTO Alex Vasilevsky, formerly of Virtual Iron — is one of them. Citrix’s “Xen guys”, meanwhile, include its vice president of special products Ian Pratt and CTO Simon Crosby, both formerly of Cambridge University and XenSource. Thus, the focus of the investment will be on “getting some really smart guys around the table.”

But Dan McCall, Virtual Computer president and CEO, acknowledges that VCI has a wealth of expertise about building a hypervisor for the wild-and-wooly world of client computers. Unlike servers, “PCs are complicated devices,” McCall said, that support a bewildering number of graphics and network cards, USB devices and the like, “and all of these different chips and technologies need to be virtualized.” VCI’s job, therefore, “is to make sure that the [virtualized] PC runs as well as it possibly can.”

However, it’s s “a little too soon to know” exactly which elements of the joint Citrix-Virtual Computer hypervisor will go back in to the open source Xen hypervisor, and which will stay proprietary, said Citrix’s Cohen. “There are a number of strategic questions about what goes in to the Xen open source hypervisor, and what part remains commercial,” Cohen said.

For its part, Virtual Computer hasn’t given up hope on its own NxTop PC management suite. “Our goal is to help Citrix get a ubiquitous Xen-based hypervisor out there,” said Dan McCall, the company’s president and CEO. That done, “there’s a whole bunch of intellectual property that is uniquely ours,” he said, for example, NxTop’s provisioning and patching, integrated backup and persistent end user personalization technologies.

The hypervisor itself, is less important, McCall said. “As we built out the product, we always intended to be able to use other hypervisors. So far, we’ve used the iTunes/iPod model where you can control both ends of the user experience, but if someone else’s hypervisor comes around, we’ll plug in to it.”

Virtual desktops: Do your own math

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about universal clients, ubiquitous data access and streamlined image management, but ultimately the question of whether virtual desktops make sense comes down to what IT decisions always come down to: money.

Johnathan,  a Server Virtualization blog reader, recently posted a comment on one of my posts detailing the math for a 250-seat virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)/thin-client implementation, which amounted to a $350 per-desktop-capex advantage for VDI; a three-times faster deployment schedule and troubleshooting times that were orders of magnitude faster (albeit harder to quantify). Not too shabby.

Of course, that was before VMware announced new pricing for its re-branded VDI suite, View 3. At $150 per seat for View Enterprise or $250 for View Premier, capex savings would decrease to $300 or $200 per desktop. That’s assuming you pay list price, which is highly doubtful. But it also doesn’t account for the storage capacity savings you might  realize by using View Composer to share desktop images: an average of 70%, according to VMware.

Suffice it to say that assigning ROI dollars to an IT project is a highly personal, subjective affair. And that the numbers posted by others are often suspect, as Bernard Golden points out in his article “Virtualization Projections Deserve Scrutiny.” Here, Golden looks into a Butler Group report that reports client virtualization savings of $159,000 for 1,000 desktops, or $159 per desktop, per year. Come to find out, the $159 savings was in energy costs alone. Who knows what the overall cost of the deployment really was?

At any rate, if you’ve done the math on a VDI implementation, and believe that your numbers bear scrutiny, go ahead and post the numbers in the comments section of our blog.

Some remaining thoughts on VDI

There’s a lot of virtual desktop news these days, and before too much time passes, I want to share some tidbits on VDI that I picked up this week and that had never occurred to me before.

1. VDI can save you money on software licenses. At least, that’s what I hear from Jeff Cunningham, a network administrator at the Agricultural and Resource Economics department at the University of Maryland, who implemented about 70 virtual desktops for faculty, staff and graduate students. For instance, an individual license for the data analysis and statistical software package Stata runs about $700. In contrast, a 10-seat network license costs the university $2,000, for a savings of $5,000, and the budget to deliver interesting software to a greater number of students.
2. Thin clients can withstand a long power outage. Kunal Patel, the IT director at Nina Plastics, whose VDI project I wrote about earlier this week, told me that during a recent power outage, the company’s regular desktops drained their APC battery backups in less than 10 minutes. Their Pano Logic thin clients, on the other hand, stayed on for four hours. In a similar vein,  the University of Maryland’s Cunningham stuck a kilowatt meter on a bank of five Pano devices and a bank of five regular desktops and discovered that the Pano devices consumed one-fourth the power of the regular desktops.
3. Some IT managers are skeptical of thin clients’ supposed cost advantages. As an example, check out Basilm’s comments on the Server Virtualization Blog. What about you, dear Server Virtualization Blog readers? Have you done the math on VDI and thin clients? What’s the verdict?
4. Big companies need big security. With their strong security and compliance needs, verticals like finance, health care and government are a natural fit for VDI. But in order for them to adopt it, the VDI community needs to support biometric authentication mechanisms, such as fingerprint readers and face recognition software.

That’s all for now, folks. Brace yourself for a lot of news on virtual desktops. Things are about to get interesting

Where regular desktops fear to tread

Have you ever marveled at how fast desktops and laptops start breaking down, even under normal working conditions? Try putting a desktop on the floor of a plastics manufacturing facility. You’ll be lucky if you get a week out of the desktop before something fails, said Kunal Patel, IT director at Nina Plastics USA in Orlando, Fla.

The production facility at Nina Plastics performs a process called plastics extrusion, which releases all manner of dust and grime into the atmosphere, clogging up fans and power supplies, and settling down on hard drives, Patel said.

At first, Patel’s staff would try and fix the broken desktops, which production workers used to log their job start and stop times. “But it became too much of a hassle for IT to constantly fix stuff,” Patel said, so the company eventually gave up on trying to computerize its production facility.

“We shouldn’t be maintenance men,” said Patel, who also oversees application development for the firm. “We all went to college and should be working on more important problems.”

However, that was before Patel, with a handful of administrative staffers, spearheaded a virtual desktop trial using a combination of VMware virtualization plus thin clients from Pano Logic.

By going with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Nina Plastics derived all the usual benefits you’d expect: faster desktop provision, easier patching and upgrading, simplified troubleshooting, etc. At the same time, Patel also found that the Pano Logic devices were robust enough to withstand the harsh conditions of the production floor. “There’s no CPU, no memory, no fan. There’s really nothing in there to break or get old,” he said. The company has since reintroduced computers into its production facility, giving customer service staff real-time visibility into the status of a particular job.

Patel also plans to add touch-screen monitors to the Pano devices, a feature v and supported in the Pano Virtual Desktop Solution (VDS) 2.5 software.

Patel had lots of other interesting stuff to say about his VDI deployment, but for now, suffice to say that he’s a fan. “It’s easy to fall in love with, especially when you have suffered so much,” Patel said. “I have fewer gray hairs, fewer lost girlfriends, and a lot of time given back to me because of virtualization.”

Piloting a VDI requires partner involvement

A successful VDI pilot is a critical step toward embracing desktop virtualization technology when migrating from traditional desktops. In this video blog, Rick Vanover discusses how to go about creating a pilot to obtain optimal results without engaging vendors in the pre-sales capacity.

Did VMworld 2008 satisfy attendees?

While VMworld 2008 left some attendees and contributors to SearchServerVirtualization.com hungry for more from VMware and its partners, others may have a different take on the conference. In this video blog, Rick Vanover offers his opinion on what VMworld offers to attendees and if it is worthwhile to attend.

VDI planning primer on DHCP scope options

Fellow virtualization expert Andrew Kutz has argued that future virtual desktop infrastructure technologies (VDI) need to lose the desktop to truly advance VDI technology, and I agree. But until that time, we have to deal with VDI as it exists today. And that means accepting certain hurdles, which means accepting additional support requirements that today’s VDI poses. Let’s consider devices and their support requirements.The key to determining how virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) devices interact with their connection broker is to identify the networking configuration. VDI devices use dynamic host control protocol (DHCP) scope options to get their configurations to the device that reflects where they go for the connection. Let’s dive into how the DHCP options are important to a VDI solution.

For starters, a DHCP scope option is a configuration that is defined on a networking server such as Windows Server’s DHCP server role. Traditional configurations for PCs and servers would have DHCP options such as subnet mask, default gateway and domain name server. VDI, however, allows the full range of DHCP scope options to be used. There are numerous scope options available for DHCP that are delivered to the requesting device in the acknowledgment message (DHCPACK), which is sent after the DHCP request message.

DHCP scope options vary by VDI device. Take for example the SunRay series of VDI devices. For VDI solutions in VMware implementations, the technology requires that at least DHCP options 49 and 66 are configured for connection to the Virtual Desktop Connector agent. Option 49 is for an X11 server window manager and 66 is a trivial file transfer protocol (TFTP) server for VDI device configuration files.

Beyond basic configuration, it may be worth tweaking some other network options based on the architecture of the VDI implementation. What has particularly caught my attention is a blog post by Sun’s Thin Client and Server Based Computing group, which points out that some environments may need to configure the maximum transmission unit (MTU) of network packets. This can also be assigned by DHCP and is of particular importance if the VDI implementation is to be a remote site with limited bandwidth. The default MTU of most configurations is around 1,500 bytes, yet performance may be better with a smaller number for maximum packet size from the endpoint VDI device. This and other factors make a fully representative pilot sound like a really good idea!

However, other platforms may use a new set of options to interact differently with the VDI device firmware. One example is the Pano Logic desktop device, which only requires the creation and configuration of option 001 as a vendor class. This is different than the example above in that there is no X11 window manager resident on the device.

While these DHCP configuration options are not overwhelming when viewed individually, it is worth considering the larger picture in the case of these options already in use. The most common example is an IP telephone at a remote site. While in central offices, IP telephony is usually split to a separate network, but this may not be the case for remote sites that have two or three VDI stations and the same number of phones. It may make sense to have only one IP network.

DHCP is critical to effective network management, including a VDI solution. Some planning on scope and configuration can go a long way to ensure that the technology will function as expected.

ThinLaunch not all that impressive

At the New Innovators both at VMworld 2008 was an interesting small booth from ThinLaunch, which was manned by three of the four people in the company. I had a short pow-wow with two of the folks there and came away with mixed feelings. The product, for which the company is named, appears to fulfill a couple of interesting needs, the first being IT shops that want to pilot virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) but don’t want to invest beyond the server room, and the second being smaller businesses that have server virtualization capacity to devote to hosting clients but have been loathe to rip and replace their thick clients with new thin hardware. I’m not too wowed by the product but I can see where it may be useful. That said, I was royally unimpressed with the technology.

ThinLaunch can be cobbled together with a few Group Policy object edits in Active Directory without buying the product. Simply replace the shell with whatever VDI launcher (or other application) you want. Microsoft tells you how to do it here. True, ThinLaunch then monitors this process if it crashes and can automatically restart it, but this is also something that can be managed with an application or by copying the code from this site.

ThinLaunch is available as an MSI package, meaning it’s very easy to deploy via Group Policy. Then again, Group Policies are even easier to deploy via group policy. Duh. ThinLaunch requires .NET 2.0. and GPOs don’t. ThinLaunch supports Windows 2000 through Vista and 2K8. GPOs do too.

I can see the need for this package and I can even see some large enterprise customers who’d want a packaged application to handle the conversion of legacy desktops. I can even see using the product in small businesses with virtualization already in place but a lot of legacy desktops and a lack of cash. What I can’t see is how it’s innovative in its approach.

Sorry, ThinLaunch, but you get three out of ten pokers — there’s just nothing hot there.

At CTO keynote, VMworld crowd starts to understand vClient

With all due respect to VMware’s new CEO Paul Maritz, the portion of yesterday’s keynote discussing VMware’s new vClient initiative didn’t seem to register much with VMworld attendees.

After the address by VMware CTO Steve Herrod, however, was a different story. Assisted by VMware’s Jerry Chen, Herrod and Chen finally got a rise out of the audience, who applauded loudly to a demonstration of 25 virtual machines being provisioned out to thin clients and laptops, then updating the master VM image with Google Chrome using ThinApp.

“I need that right now,” said the attendee sitting behind me at the conclusion of Chen’s demonstration. “Heck, I needed that yesterday.”

I think part of the crowd’s enthusiasm simply had to do with finally “getting it.” Unlike Maritz, Chen used the word ‘hypervisor’ to describe the “thin-client virtualization layer” that drives VMware’s vClient idea of being able to manage disconnected laptops as well as connected VDI thin clients. By saying the H word, 14,000 VMworld attendees had a collective aha moment.

Whatever the case, with vClient, VMware has once again taken a top-down approach, tackling the enterprise’s “desktop dilemma” rather than that of the consumer or SMB. In a subsequent conversation with VMware senior director of product marketing Bogomil Balkansky, he said it’s not that those segments don’t have desktop dilemmas of their own, rather, “the problems of the enterprise are very well identified,” and thus, for VMware, the enterprise is “a much easier entry point.”

Looking out a few years, however, Balkansky described a distinctly consumer-focused scenario. Home users today run full-fledged PCs, complete with a host OS, and all the attending management issues. At the same time, home users engage largely in web-focused activities. “Given that everything I do is Web-connected, why isn’t that part of my DSL service?” Balkansky asked rhetorically.

In other words, Balkansky is insinuating that someday, users’ personal desktops will run as VDI images hosted by the Verizons and Comcasts of the world rather than locally on their home PCs. For a small monthly fee, users will enjoy the convenience of a centrally managed, backed up desktop that they can access from anywhere, and easily recover even if their disk drive fails or laptop is stolen. That’s an idea that just about everyone can get their head around.