Read Jim Henrys’ answers to your questions during Tuesday’s Virtualisation round table discussion.
Q: Dan Robinson: How would laptop users fit into a virtualised desktop (VDI) environment?
A: Looking ahead… in theory once a desktop is instantiated as an x86 virtual machine it can be moved from a server to a client device (as VMs can today be moved from server to server in dynamic resource pools); thus a desktop in a VDI environment can be migrate to a client device where it can then be used in both connected and disconnected states.
Q: Manek Dubash - How important is flexibility of device at the desktop - should all be locked down or should end users get to choose their own devices?
A: In today’s environment a standardized “one size fits all” approach has been adopted to make the image build & validation process & support model one which is manageable. This approach is somewhat device centric. Looking forward, virtualization offers us a way to become more user centric. For example, an individual in the enterprise may be using multiple devices for IT purposes – be it laptop, netbook or one of the emerging MID devices – and they want to access the same IT from each device. Virtualization offers the potential to virtualize an individual’s desktop/profile to a standardized x86 machine which can then migrate from device to device effectively “following them around”. As IT would only have to concern them about validating an image for standard Virtual Machine it offers, again potentially, greater flexibility of device and form factor. Client side hypervisors, the missing ingredient needed to make this happen should become available in during 2010.
Q: Manek Dubash: What's the impact of so-called green computing on desktop virtualisation?
A: Proponents of server side desktop virtualization would argue that a Thin Client device used to access a virtual desktop is consumes less power than a traditional PC. The thin client advocates will often use old, unmanaged desktops in power comparisons, which naturally paint PC-based computing in the most unfavorable light. Also, beware of vendors that use the PC’s maximum power to calculate its power consumption. PCs operate at maximum power only under peak workloads, such as video encoding, and spend most of their time at idle power. Further, you must look at power consumption of the complete end-2-end solution, not just the end point. Hence, to get a true picture the data center PUE and virtual desktops that can be hosted per server also need to be factored in.
Q: Chris - How can virtualization help startups from the word go, and would it be advisable to develop for it?
A: If starting up a new business today how would provision IT? There are vendors providing Software as a Service SaaS (e.g. salesforce.com), Platform as a Service PaaS (eg. Azure) and Infrastructure as a Service SAAS (e.g. Amazon EC2) with PaaS and SaaS models often based on server virtualization to be dynamically provisioned and scaled. With the advent of Client Virtualization the opportunity arises to provide Desktop as a Service – something for the SI community to explore. What will be interesting is seeing as a startup matures at which point it starts to bring key IT functions in-house as it is something that gives a competitive advantage; likewise when does an enterprise look to outsource non-competitive advantage IT functions?
Q: Anon - does the hardware make a difference? I see a lot of technology now having to be built into the thin client to compensate for graphics across the network, surely a PC still is better for this
A:Yes, the hardware makes a big difference to both the user experience and to IT. From the user side the advent of rich content such as Unified Communications (voice, video, collaboration); visualization (the emergence of the 3D internet) and rich applications (sliverlight, flash) which improve productivity need the powerful client side compute capabilities. Network load and graphics processing server-side can cause significant negative impact on the infrastructure – hence thin vendors have started looking at need for hardware acceleration technologies. Further, the Thin Client vendors have “thin clients” with 1GHz+ CPUs and embedded Windows XP operating systems to deal with these types of scenarios… begs the question “how thin is thin?” From the IT perspective Intel has a suite of capabilities that fall under the Intel vPro badge that improve/secure client side virtualization. Namely VT technology to ensure near native performance (to optimize and reduce the load of the overhead needed to run a hypervisor) and Trusted Execution Technology that can protect client side virtual machines from security threats.
