The market for desktop virtualisation has finally matured according to industry experts. Citrix’s Patrick Irwin, who is the company’s product marketing manager, told ComputerScope that a recent Citrix-backed survey showed that "over half" of the Irish businesses questioned were planning on investing in desktop virtualisation", adding that similar trends are emerging in the US and elsewhere.
George Dowling, solutions architect with Ergo IT Infrastructure admitted the widespread adoption of the virtualised desktop has been a slow process, lasting the best part of the last five years. "There are so many ‘flavours’ [of desktop virtualisation] like with Windows 7 or without Windows 7, then application only; published desktops; streamed desktops; online and offline desktops et cetera," he said. "It’s easy to see how many customers were a little confused."
Dowling indicated two major developments in the past six months that have helped the virtualised desktop infrastructure (VDI) cause greatly-VDI-in-a-Box and virtual desktops for laptops. The former is a development also flagged by pre-sales technical consultant with HP Ireland, Ben Cranks.
According to Cranks, "The growth of simpler to deploy solutions such as VDI-in-a-Box from Citrix, is making it much easier for customers to deploy VDI by reducing the number of servers, and services that have to be managed across multiple boxes, to a simple ‘one page’ interface. This should allow smaller organisations to take advantage of the lower management and deployment cost of virtualised desktops."
Previous iterations of the virtual desktop were, Cranks said, "out of reach of those users with most to gain as they required a significant number of IT staff to configure and manage the solution".
LAPTOPS
Dowling’s point about virtual desktops for laptops led on to another Citrix mainstay, XenClient, which has just gone through its second release. "It used to be the case that laptops were the special use cases," Dowling said, "where you provided packaged applications that could be accessed locally, when a user was not online. Methods of checking out laptops did not really work or caused more problems than they were worth, but a lot of these challenges seem to be overcome in the latest release."
Dowling added, "A number of our clients need full desktop and applications when offline. Using this technology enables you to have a local copy of the corporate desktop securely running on a HyperVisor on your laptop. The laptop users don’t even know they are running a virtual desktop. The benefit is that when users come back online they get their updates and new apps in the background, without them even being aware it is going on. In addition, all laptop data can be backed up to the corporate network and everything is secure and encrypted."
ADDRESSING ISSUES
Neill Stone-Wigg, CTO with Trilogy Technologies said that recent developments in the VDI space have been focused on "how to address the issues that have caused VDI to have a slow take up" in the first place. Expanding on his point, he added, "These issues are primarily around cost, performance and user experience. There are now VDI solutions that present the appropriate emphasis on tackling these issues."
"Understanding the opportunities has definitely become clearer," said Stone-Wigg. "Cisco, NetApp and VMware have recognised this, and created Flexpod, a validated design using their combined technologies. Flexpod configurations have been stress-tested with virtualised desktop scenarios to prove out the fact that Flexpod is an ideal platform on which to run VDI implementations, satisfying the issues of cost, performance and user experience."
Another mention of VMware’s VDI trailblazing comes from Comsys sales director, Ben McGahon. He highlighted VSphere 5 and VMware View which have, he said, provided benefits around bandwidth optimisation as well as "improvements in handling multimedia and rich content files", allowing for "full fidelity 3D graphics" in Windows 7 environments.
The VMware View solution meanwhile also allows for delivery of "rich user experiences for end-users across an organisation on any device at any location". "High-performance PC-over-IP (PCoIP) technology lets users work with their virtual desktops via a LAN or WAN connection," continued McGahon, "while VMware View Client with ‘local mode’ enables them to work offline and leverage local processing resources."
END-USER FUNCTIONALITY
A lack of built-in end-user functionality has been one of the core reasons VDI has been avoided by some clients for the past few years. It’s an issue which McGahon admitted is "not entirely solved yet".
However, he added that "huge progress" has been made in developments of end user applications. "As we move more and more into the era of apps delivered over IP and HTML the last remaining functionality restrictions are being overcome through the versatility of the virtual desktop technology.
"In many ways, the advent of tablet PCs has helped bring the full potential of virtual desktop into the mainstream. Now, senior business users have a huge influence over what is required of VDI in every organisation, whereas traditionally these initiatives were driven by the IT organisation."
Linda Chester, Avnet’s VMware sales manager, was also enthusiastic about the possibilities brought about by tablets. "When delivering a VDI to a device like this it’s important to get the desktops and applications delivered in a familiar way but also take advantage of the functionality of the tablet. If you look at the iPad client for View for instance, we have passed through native gesturing from the iPad into the View session so the user can pinch shrink and enlarge the screen, scroll, et cetera, just as they would in a native iPad application."
WEBTOPS
Those still wary of virtual desktops will often cite how the entire concept is somewhat out of date and that web-based desktops, or ‘webtops’ are what many clients are currently looking for. Ronan Coy, lead technical services specialist with Fujitsu, said that the rise of cloud-based ‘webtops’, or web operating system, has been an "interesting development which allows users lots of flexibility in terms of connecting from any device with a compatible browser".
Continuing, Coy noted that the webtop is potentially much more flexible and adaptable for mobile devices as it is based on internet technologies which work more effectively on small form factors than VDI. However, he added that, "Although there are some who feel that the growing popularity of web-based desktops makes desktop virtualisation less important I don’t entirely agree. The IT environments within many organisations are complex and many use proprietary or legacy applications that are critical to their business but are not easily adapted to web platforms. Such changes can incur significant costs and business disruptions that cannot be justified and thus moving to VDI implementations is a more streamlined progression. Furthermore," he said, "the ‘webtop’ is somewhat restrictive in terms of being able to install additional applications and user’s ability to customise the experience is limited."
INTEGRATION CHALLENGES
Infrastructure architect with Triangle, Donal Byrne weighed in on the webtop argument saying that "VDIs will be relevant for some time to come yet, but there’s no denying that web-based desktops and applications are appealing and ultimately may be where client computing moves to. However, it isn’t there yet."
He added, "There are still challenges with integration, security and legacy client-server applications which need to be overcome and until then, virtual desktops can play an important role in delivering agility, flexibility and security to businesses and end users."
Senior solutions architect with Datapac, Wayne Byrne added that, "The traditional VDI scenario of virtualising desktops and delivering the full experience is becoming dated, and it is primarily about delivering the right experience to the right user at the right time. That experience may be a full desktop but in the main it is about applications-giving users access to applications on whatever device they may choose to use."
Byrne added that, as a rule, virtualisation vendors are becoming "more device-aware". Some have, he said, put solutions in place which ensures "the device that is ‘requesting’ the desktop experience is immaterial to that experience".
The webtop issue also interested Arkphire CTO Howard Roberts, who claimed that the whole issue "really comes down to what an organisation’s employees need to deliver their day-to-day functions".
Elaborating, he said, "For example, in a call centre-task based workers in this environment generally find they need two or three web-based applications delivered to fulfil their requirements. However, a knowledge worker, someone who is constantly creating data and documents, may need a physical or virtual desktop in order to complete their tasks. This creates confusion within organisations as they are not 100% sure what their workers need with certain applications not designed for web based delivery yet. However with developments from Citrix, VMware and so on, the market is starting to settle for virtualised applications over the Web."
ONE LEVEL HIGHER
With a rapidly developing client base, as well as a scramble to create more evolved technology, the virtual desktop space looks like it has an interesting few years ahead. Quest Software’s remote desktop services MVP, Michael Roth said the battle to "take it one level higher" should mean that "personal cloud" and "consumerisation of IT" initiatives will drive many of the key technologies in the next few years.
"Technologies that will have an increased impact on desktop virtualisation are HTML5, mobile device management (MDM) and a general wave of technologies that will make desktop virtualisation more ‘context aware’," said Roth.
"Desktop virtualisation technologies will know what device you are using, how you are using it and where you are using it from to provide you with the best possible user experience to be productive whilst still allow IT to guarantee security and compliance."
Asked the same question regarding the development of the virtual desktop, director of managed services with IT Force, Joe Molloy said the VDI landscape will be affected "with the emergence of XML 5 and the fact that more software vendors are moving towards a SaaS model".
"Apple and Google are gaining market share so more users will be utilising their own end-point devices therefore pushing corporates towards a wider range of technologies to support."
Cranks of HP commented that the increasing power of mobile devices and thin clients will allow more cost effective devices to start supporting "high-end features such as video codec acceleration, flash offload and local resources such as Java clients". Cranks went on to say that "as the protocols expand their functionality the current higher cost of a video playback supporting virtualised desktop should come down overall" as well.
SOCIAL COLLABORATION
Elsewhere, Howard Roberts, CTO with Arkphire felt that "more activity in desktop services in the cloud" is inevitable. "Also," he said, "we should see changes to the purchase models for desktop licences to accommodate desktop virtualisation. A more predictable cost model for scaling data centre management with larger vendors, in one standardised model will become more popular."
Citrix’s Irwin though said that "another area to watch for development is optimisation of the network". He added, "Whether it’s a virtual desktop or app it has to be optimised so that it’s a great experience. I think that’s going to be an important factor for clients in the years ahead."
Asked about the virtual desktop’s future, Fujitsu’s Coy stated that "virtual desktop transition, personalisation and social collaboration features" should all be areas of concern for companies who want to stay ahead. Indeed, Coy expects major virtual desktop vendors to streamline and simplify the transition and transformation process. "Technologies for automatically profiling existing applications and virtualising them will be built into virtualisation technologies making VDI deployments simpler," he said.
DEMAND MORE
The Coy was another who focused on mobility, and after commenting that "users will demand more consumer-based technologies in the enterprise", said that it will become more and more difficult to distinguish thin client devices from the smartphone as new features enable them "to act as the connecting device for enterprise services and applications".
"Why provide physical desktops, laptops or thin clients for every user if they already have powerful hardware like a smart phone in their pocket? Mobile docking features provide an opportunity to transform how the modern enterprise will operate," commented Coy.
"In addition, technologies such as Horizon Mobile from VMware offer a glimpse of dual persona workspaces within mobile devices of the future. One personal smartphone with all the normal capabilities and a second secure ‘persona’ that provides access to a range of business applications."
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