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20 November 2013

Isolation
Niall Gilmore has been involved with desktop virtualisation longer than most in Ireland, with Citrix and for some years now in Unity Technology Solutions as head of its virtualisation and cloud practice. “You can’t look at any form of VDI in isolation, I think, and you certainly have to think about the costs over say three to five years in making a business case. When you do, the three main solutions from Citrix, VMware and Microsoft come out broadly similar when you factor in all of the elements, including licensing costs for the virtualisation itself and for the applications. In the case of Microsoft, for example, if you don’t have its Software Assurance for Volume Licensing across your applications you may well need to pay for Virtual Desktop Access licences. The point to be emphasised is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ in the technology or the licensing or the business case for different organisations.”

Full VDI, as Gilmore explains, involves essentially taking the complete images of all of your staff desktops into the data centre and its enterprise grade SAN or other storage. “If you have already virtualised your servers using VMware that is a logical path that most VMware users will probably start with. On the other hand, the hosted, shared model is an alternative, typically on Citrix XenApp, that publishes one common desktop image and standard set of applications. That conserves data centre storage capacity and will probably produce a more attractive business case in cost terms.”

Yet another approach is possible using Microsoft Server 2012 which incorporates Remote Desktop Services (developed in partnership with Citrix) and a universal client for remote devices. A few weeks ago Microsoft launched a Remote Desktop app for iOS and Android, but not yet for Windows Phone.

The salient point overall, Gilmore says, is that there are a number of options to achieve similar flexibility and benefits. “Virtual desktop is not happening for its own sake. It’s usually when it is wrapped up in a larger business case—easier to change operating systems, coping with BYOD—that the package becomes fully persuasive.”

Licensing issues
Another virtualisation veteran, Arkphire CTO Howard Roberts, starts with that lingering issue of licensing. “The Microsoft licensing stack has been inflexible and restrictive and although that has been somewhat alleviated, it has not disappeared and there are application vendors whose licensing terms are still less than attractive in a virtualisation context. It is still almost 99% at the desk side although we are seeing some organisations flirting with Ubuntu or Red Hat on licence cost grounds.

“In reality, what most people want is not a full virtual desktop but the flexible delivery of their applications remotely to any type of device and both VMware and Microsoft seem to be recognising this today. The market has in some ways gone past the full virtual desktop towards virtualising the applications and delivering them to the device of choice. So today’s solution is to deliver applications and even full VDI simply via HTML5 browser.” It’s become all about following the customers and how they want to consume their ICT rather than shoehorning them into your way of doing things.”

Roberts goes further and suggests that the restrictions now are related to the device O/S and what applications can be pushed to it. “Roll it all on a little further and we believe there will be a decoupling of the application from the O/S underneath it, on any device, and just giving it the minim needed to drive it as opposed to the bloated operating systems we have seen on traditional desktop devices.”

Peter McKay, Desktone

The kind of virtual desktop solution that will appeal strongly to SME combines local service, a known ‘throat to choke’ as smaller enterprises prefer, with a state-of-the-art infrastructure. The packages may vary with scale or sector or geography, but the key is the single source for whatever solution is appropriate, Peter McKay, Desktone

Apps onboard
But in many ways that’s just today’s apps world, Roberts says, where the little app runs on the device. “There are also many requirements for centralised compute power to run more complex software—Excel pivot tables, for example, or various forms of applied analytics. This is also an area where projects have gone wrong in the past in sizing the central infrastructure required. The test environment may run very well and then problems arise when you attempt to scale up to hundreds of users, perhaps even thousands. Desktop workloads and server workloads, for example, are very different and don’t sit well on common technology infrastructure.” 

This is where we are seeing the arrival of purpose-built appliances for virtual desktops, such as the recently launched Dell VRTX and others. “As a VMware and EMC house, principally, we are looking to ratified pre-built architectures using VMware View and Horizon View that are guaranteed to perform at certain levels—this specified workload, 100 or 300 seats or whatever, ‘factory built’ and so very quick to deploy,” Roberts explains. “That’s in the data centre. Then you have to decide what you’re going to roll out on the desk side—thin client, zero client, re-use existing clients or whatever. But once that has been done then you can mix and match and change your devices and delivery channels and almost everything else.”  

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