Desktop virtualization is a growing force in the overall virtualization trend — and with good reason. It can help organizations slash desktop management and support costs while speeding application deployments, improving security and business continuity, and delivering green benefits. Here’s how.
In an economic downturn, IT projects tend to focus on saving money, increasing operational efficiency and increasing flexibility. It’s little wonder, then, that the virtualization market has proven impervious to the global recession. Analyst firm Gartner Inc. recently reported that it expects worldwide virtualization software revenue to increase 43 percent from $1.9 billion in 2008 to $2.7 billion in 2009. Global virtualization penetration is on pace to reach 20 percent in 2009 from 12 percent in 2008.
Gartner’s definition of the virtualization market includes desktop virtualization. Gartner estimates that revenue from desktop virtualization will more than triple from $74.1 million to $298.6 million in 2009. Although desktop virtualization is an emerging technology that currently represents just 11 percent of the virtualization software revenue market, it will account for a growing proportion of corporate users through 2013.
Gartner describes desktop virtualization as a full, thick-client user environment, including the operating system and applications, run as a virtual machine on a server and accessed remotely through a window on a remote device. Within that broad definition, there are a number of solutions and architectures organizations can employ to take advantage of the benefits of desktop virtualization.
“FusionStorm’s engineers can help customers choose among Citrix XenApp Server, VMware VDI and Microsoft Terminal Services for their desktop virtualization platform,” said Vince Conroy, CTO, FusionStorm. “We can further help them determine whether it makes sense to remove all the desktop PCs and replace them with zero clients or thin clients, take a hybrid approach with a mixture of thick and thin clients, or use desktop virtualization for specific applications. We can also provide a fully hosted solution.
“Whatever approach makes the most sense, organizations are seeing real, bottom-line benefits with desktop virtualization, including reduced desktop management costs, greater agility and speed of deployment, and a smaller carbon footprint.”
The Right Stuff
FusionStorm has helped numerous organizations take advantage of these benefits. FusionStorm’s engineering team can perform an architecture review, as well as the design and deployment and support of Citrix, VMware and Microsoft solutions.
“Citrix has by far the most mature product but VMware is getting a lot of traction because people have become familiar with VMware virtualization technology through their server consolidation projects. We have engineers certified in both platforms,” said Conroy. “There’s also an ecosystem of add-on products that we can bring to the project, including object brokers that can provide additional performance, security and management features.
“For customers who want to give users access to applications without owning or supporting any servers, FusionStorm can offer it as a turnkey fully hosted solution.”
Desktop virtualization dramatically reduces the cost of managing desktop systems because each user’s personal settings, applications and data are stored within the data center. When it comes time to make a change to the desktop environment, such as adding or upgrading an application or even patching the operating system, IT only needs to apply the change once to the virtual desktop image and it is immediately applied to everyone using that image.
“Desktop virtualization also improves security and business continuity,” said Conroy. “There’s no data stored on the endpoint so you don’t have to worry about backing up those devices. And if someone’s laptop or PDA gets lost or stolen you don’t have to worry about a security breach.”
Through Thick and Thin
Desktop virtualization also gives organizations the opportunity to rethink their desktop infrastructure, Conroy said. While virtualized applications can be accessed via traditional PCs, organizations may opt to deploy thin clients or zero clients. These solutions offer a number of benefits.
“A zero client is a tiny device about four inches square. It consumes less than 3 watts —less power than most desktop PCs use when they’re in standby mode. So zero clients are extremely green, but the primary benefit is that they can dramatically reduce operational costs,” Conroy said. “They also reduce upgrade cycles because the lifetime of that device is far greater than most desktop PCs. With most desktop PCs you’re looking at upgrading every two to three years. A virtual desktop device will need to be replaced every three to five years."
Another option is to take an existing PC and repurpose it as a thin client. A lot of organizations have older PCs that aren’t powerful enough to run the latest version of Windows. This is a way to get some additional life out of this equipment.
“But even if you have power users or remote users who need full-blown thick clients you can still benefit from the virtual desktop technology,” Conroy said. “The focus here is on the application rather than the end-user. Desktop virtualization can take applications that normally require a thick client and provide access from anywhere because it doesn’t require a lot of bandwidth. You need less than 50Kbps in some cases to run the application remotely.”
Desktop virtualization is not right for every end-user, every environment or every application. However, any organization that has a large number of users performing a finite set of tasks, or applications that need to be delivered anywhere, can see real bottom-line benefits with this technology. By taking applications off the desktop and centralizing them within the data center, desktop virtualization can reduce operational costs, increase energy efficiency and improve business agility.