VMware Desktop Infrastructure

Virtualization virtual tradeshow offers VMware networking opportunities

Trade shows are great – if you have time to attend, have staff to cover while you’re away learning about a new technology, can avoid summons back to the office during the show, can find a show in your local area or can get budget approval to attend a show that requires flight or hotel reservations.

Enter the virtual trade show (VTS); an online conference conceived to mitigate the above challenges. Last week, sister sites SearchDataCenter.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com hosted an advanced enterprise virtualization VTS. I helped staff the networking lounge and editorial booth where I had the opportunity to chat with VMware users about two of the virtualization provider’s newest tools, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and Storage VMotion.

IM chatting with attendees
Conversations ranged from general IT talk (“Anyone use virtual desktops?”) to small talk (“What’s the weather like in Maine?”). Trying to be the friendly host, I said “Good morning” to the room. I immediately got the reply “Good evening” and was subsequently told this particular user was signed on from –literally–the other side of the world.

I ended up chiming-in on another user’s question about if anyone was familiar with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). The respondent had said that he was, and I ended up asking him about his experience via private IM. SRM orchestrates your virtual machine disaster recovery (DR) plan in the event that your main data center goes down. It prioritizes which virtual machines (VMs) are brought up at the failover site based on available resources, syncs your VM configurations between the main site and the failover site, and allows for DR plan testing without having to take the system offline. It’s a relatively new addition to the VI3 lineup, having been on the market for four months (at the time of publication).

Our conversation turned to plug-ins, and he raved about Andrew Kutz’s Storage VMotion plug-in. The plug-in adds a user interface to the out-of-the-box product, which operates through a command line interface. The attendee explained that he’s primarily a “Windows guy,” so a graphical user interface makes using Storage VMotion much easier.

Kutz recently released an update to the Storage VMotion plug-in.

“The new release now ignores raw device mapping,” Kutz said. “Previously, if you had a raw device that pointed to a 300 Gig disk, the plug-in would look at it as an actual disk and screw up the disk size map.”

He also removed the majority VMware’s internal code from the plug-in (excepting the code that loads the plug-in), replacing it with code based on the VI Toolkit for .NET.

Impressive user interface
The VTS emulates the look of a physical tradeshow floor, which makes navigation a bit friendly, though not as intuitive as I would have liked. You could either move around with the help of a clickable navigation bar, or point-and-click your way from the main entryway to the desired location, be it the conference hall, vendor hall, networking lounge or “library” where you can download PDFs of presentations and various information from vendors, which then moves into your “suitcase,” displayed on your personal page.

VTSs are essentially fancy webcast packages displayed in unconventional ways. In this particular show, the topics were “Protecting your Virtual Environment: Backup and Storage,” “Virtual Infrastructure Automation and High Availability Best Practices” and “Virtual Infrastructure Tuning and Advanced Management.” The speaker was displayed on the left side of the screen presenting his slides via streaming video. The slides were displayed on the right hand side. Users could ask questions via a box at the bottom of the screen.

The VTS, if done correctly, has many more plusses than minuses. As long as there is a reliable Internet connection, there’s no need to leave the data center (if you don’t have a reliable connection in your data center, you might think about leaving for good). The content is almost exactly the same as at a physical trade show (that’s how they got the video of the speaker to begin with). And editorial staff can send IT pros direct links to helpful guides that they know of if an IT pro wants to know about, for example, virtual desktop drawbacks.

If any SearchVMware.com readers passed up the opportunity to “attend” a virtual trade show, I suggest you test it out next time a topic of interest comes around. It’s actually fun to use (think AOL in the 90’s minus the “you’ve got mail”) and offers great learning potential and networking opportunities.

An archived version of the advanced enterprise virtualization virtual trade show is available online, short registration required.

VMware announces new desktop virtualization services, thin client certification

VMware, Inc. recently made two announcements surrounding its Virtual Desktop Infrastruture (VDI) product–a new certification program for thin client devices, and a suite of services to help implement and manage virtual desktops.

VDI is desktop virtualization software that replaces traditional PCs with virtual machines (VM) deployed from and managed in the data center. This presents a number of potential benefits: all of the information on that desktop VM, is protected from disaster and theft; thousands of VMs can be updated from the data center without touching actual desktops; and employees can also log into their virtual machine remotely.

VMware is not alone in the desktop virtualization space, however. Several vendors offer desktop virtualization products, including Sun Microsystems, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc. and Pano Logic, Inc.

VMware’s certification program is based on the company’s open standards. Virtual desktop users can expect a consistent experience when using VMware certified thin client devices.

After thin client devices have been certified, they will be listed on the VMware Certified Compatibility Guide. The devices listed in the Guide will have passed VMware’s testing criteria for interoperability and quality assurance .

VMware’s other announcement today is a set of new Professional Services that offers best practices and guidance from virtualization experts. Here is a rundown of what these services include:

*Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Jumpstart: A VMware Certified Professional will train up to five staff in setting up VMware products, provide knowledge transfer and discuss best practices of deployment.

*Application Virtualization Jumpstart: VMware Professional Services offers training on running any version of any application on a single OS without conflict.

*Plan and Design for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Application Virtualization: Begins with assessment and analysis of the customer’s objectives and existing infrastructure. VMware Professional Services then builds a blueprint for VDI and/or Application Virtualization deployment

*Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) Services Acceleration Kit: helps simplify the process of optimizing customers’ remote and branch offices using VDI.

The list price for Jumpstarts in North America range from $6,000 to $13,500. For education classes, it’s $2995 for the four day class, accoring to a VMware spokesperson.

Desktop virtualization is still a mixed bag

During a session on desktop virtualization at the VMware virtualization forum in New York last week it became clear that many hurdles still hinder adoption of what Gartner called in 2004 the next disruptive PC technology.

How much does desktop virtualization really save?
Kicking off the session was NEC departmental servers director Ken Hertzler who went through the usual sponsor sales pitch mixed in with some moderately interesting statistics in hopes of making the case for desktop virtualization. When businesses hand out laptops to employees, they are actually making a bigger investment than the few hundred dollars for the machine. NEC puts management costs somewhere around $4500 over a three year period; and those costs are rising. Of course, Hertzler identified desktop virtualization as the key to reducing those costs.

Mark A. Margevicius is the research director at Stamford, Conn.-based research organization Gartner, and he agreed that businesses can save by deploying virtual desktops. He said that quantifying exactly how much savings, however, can be sticky. “On average, our customers save two to 12% from a TCO perspective,” he said. Measuring total cost of ownership makes it difficult to pin down savings. For example, how do you measure how much you save in PC uptime? Or, to put it another way, how often do non-virtual PCs go down?

But it isn’t just about the cost of maintaining remote workers. The security risks are often enormous. Hertzler cited a local banking firm that estimates the cost of a lost or stolen laptop in the neighborhood of $50,000 when it’s all said and done. Although Margevicius wasn’t surprised by this number, he said that every organization measures these expenses differently. “You could argue that losing the laptop you gave to the janitor to play solitare with would result in high cost,” he said.

For Margevicius, it’s all about the capital costs versus TCO to which people need to pay attention. Most customers get hung up on capital costs, i.e. the investment it takes to get things going. What many people are realizing, however, is that desktop virtualization is a shared resource and that many of the savings come in the form of things like higher levels of redundancy.

Hardware requirements coming to the forefront
After throwing out some scary numbers, Hertzler ended with a demonstration of NEC’s desktop virtualization server designed specifically for use in VMware virtual desktop environments. The crowning feature of the server is its fault tolerance and automatic failover capability. In fact, Hertzler had been running his entire presentation on a virtual machine hosted on one of these very servers.

He asked a volunteer to unplug the power, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, the server automatically failed over to the backup with no interruption to the single VM running an instance of Power Point and what looked like Windows Explorer. Sweetening the deal was the nearly unnoticeable 30 seconds before he could open his applications back up–very impressive.

But it wasn’t the server technology, per se, that Margevicius was concerned about—it’s storage. “Most people at minimum take for granted the amount of storage a PC has. People expect 80, 10, 250 gigs of local storage as part of the platform,” he said, it goes back to the question of capital costs. “How much storage do you allocate in your data center [for local storage on virtual PCs]?” This, again, is a question of how much capital cost you want to invest in your virtual infrastructure.

Are we ready for desktop virtualization?
Gartner still sees maturity as a major hurdle. Although Mark acknowledges the progress made by VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, components such as software and brokering technology still need to be addressed and improved.

The question of maturity is raised in terms of scalability. Most deployments are still in the area of 100 or so virtual desktops and many of those are still in pilot or testing. Although he couldn’t release names, Mark said that he knows of a handful of people who’ve “gotten religion” over virtual infrastructure and who have plans to move into the 500-1000 virtual desktop range with the end goal of an entire virtual desktop architecture.