VDI

With VDI, has VMware barked up the wrong tree?

When it comes to the desktop, it’s clear that virtualization has a huge role to play. But is the desktop best served by VMware’s server-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) model? Some people don’t think so.

At Virtual Computer, a new startup in Westford, Mass., the thinking is that for desktops, the virtualization layer belongs directly on the client, in the form of a bare-metal hypervisor. There the hypervisor brings management benefits like simplified provisioning and patching of images, but without of the mobility and performance limitations of VDI, said Doug Lane, Virtual Computer’s director of product marketing and management.

When VMware announced its intention to deliver a client hypervisor for “offline VDI” this fall, the company tacitly acknowledged VDI’s shortcomings, according to Lane. Meanwhile, the company is still focused squarely on delivering the desktop from the server.

“With VMware, offline VDI is the niche case,” he said. But when Virtual Computer looks out at the enterprise, it sees a preponderance of laptops and thick clients. “Our model starts there, and we think that server-hosted desktops are the niche case.”

To that end, Virtual Computer is developing NxTop, a PC management suite pronounced “nextop.” It consists of a Xen bare-metal hypervisor called NxTop Engine optimized for laptop-class hardware and that runs Windows virtual machines. Those are managed by its NxTop Control console from which administrators can configure and provision images, set up access and protection policies, and the like. NxTop is currently in beta and is scheduled to ship by the end of the first quarter of 2009.

Without making a stake in the ground and validating one strategy over another, Gartner senior research analyst Terry Cosgrove agreed that there several  issues with hosted virtual desktops (Gartner-speak for VDI). “Hosted virtual desktops are an immature, adolescent technology” that won’t be ready for mainstream use for a number of years, he said. In the meantime, “there’s a place for alternative architectures to achieve the same thing – centralized management and control, but that gives users some autonomy.”

Cosgrove also said that several stealth-mode startups working on VDI alternatives will emerge over the next couple of months. There is also speculation that Microsoft and/or Citrix are developing client hypervisors of their own, and questions about which tack laptop OEMs like Dell and Lenovo will promote. One thing is clear, though: With laptop sales now exceeding desktop sales, those OEMs “are highly motivated to have a solution that will not prohibit the sales of laptops,” Cosgrove said.

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.

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.

VDI process selection revolves heavily on the endpoint device

Selecting a VDI environment is a daunting process. As I begin to evaluate technologies for VDI design and implementation for an upcoming project, the first step is often to identify the requirements from the end-user perspective.

Administrators frequently get wrapped up in the server side of a technology that the experience end of the solution may be overlooked. Two specific pieces of functionality such as screen resolution and dual monitor support can be incredibly important to the endpoint experience, and may make an implementation fail if it does not meet the requirements of all applications involved. By comparison, other topics such as USB device support, printing and sound are more of a policy decision rather than a device selection process decision.

We strategically arrive at determining device capabilities to match the requirements. At that point, we can then ‘back into’ various backend VDI solutions. Take for example the Sun Ray 2FS Virtual Display Client, which offers two DVI-I (digital video interface) ports that can provide a resolution with one monitor at 1920 x 1200 resolution, or two monitors at 3840 x 1200. Among VDI devices the standard offering is a 1600 x 1200 resolution which will satisfy most resolution situations, however. The dual DVI-I monitor may seem like overkill for a VDI-based thin client, but for many systems that perform archival by scanning documents, the high resolution and dual monitor functionality may be a requirement. Just ask any accounts payable clerk.

Some of this functionality may be circumvented by the use of existing devices, specifically VDI solutions that allow a Windows or other operating system PC to connect to the VDI broker. In this regard, if there are a very limited number of systems with requirements that may not be accommodated with standard endpoint devices, the typical PC can be used to provide the VDI connection from a full install PC. While not ideal, it is a decent stop-gap measure and a way to use of existing equipment.

VMware helps hospital reduce data center power, increase performance

Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware, Inc. announced that Rochester General Hospital(RGH) deployed VMware Infrastructure 3 to scale and manage its growing IT environment.

RGH, a community-based teaching hospital, has an IT infrastructure supporting business applications and patient-critical systems as well as massive amounts of data storage that is growing exponentially.

“We started using virtualization to address power and space issues in our main datacenter. We quickly adopted VMWare ESX as our standard platform for new projects and consolidated existing servers,” Tom Gibaud, an IT manager at RGH, said in an email. “It allowed us to continue business as usual and we experienced no delay in completing projects on time. Today we are way below our power threshold and gained about 50% of our floor space even after we doubled the amount of Windows Servers.”

In VMware’s statement, VMware Infrastructure has improved application performance and availability, and strengthened the hospital’s disaster-recovery capabilities. “Before going virtual, our datacenter power supply was maxed out. We couldn’t plug in a toaster. Now, with less hardware, we have capacity to handle whatever comes our way,” Gibaud said.

The hospital now runs 50 virtual machine hosts running 400 Guests with a mix of large and small workloads including terminal services, Gibaud said. In all, RGH has virtualized about 95% of its Windows-based applications, including Exchange, SQL Server, the ClinicalCare portal that physicians and nurses use to access electronic medical records, and RGH’s billing system.

In the initial phase of the virtualization deployment, Gibaud said the hospital used IBM Bladecenter servers (HS20, HS21, LS20). “This allowed us to condense many servers is a small amount of space. With VMware and IBM Bladecenters we were able to consolidate over a 150 Servers into one rack,” he said. “Today we use IBM x3850 and HP DL580 G5 to handle larger server workloads.”

In addtion, the hospital is running 200 Windows XP desktops using VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on just two IBM x3850’s.