Virtual Desktops

Traditional desktops are difficult environments to manage and represent one of the most underutilised assets in an organisations. Computing uses thick clients, each client having a local operating system and locally installed applications. The disadvantages with this set up includes:

Managing a distributed PC environment - deploying applications, patching, version control, providing support and provisioning PCs to new users. This is an extremely time consuming and inefficient use of IT staff.

High Total Cost of Ownership - this complex environment is extremely expensive to support and maintain. More than 70% of the total cost of ownership of a desktop is spent on operational activities associated with managing the PC - software installations, managing end-users, hardware maintenance and repairs, provisioning and upgrading PCs. In a large organisation, with large numbers of dispersed PCs, IT struggles to meet user demands.

Inefficient Computing Utilisation - in addition to the high cost, the PC is underutilised. Typically, a user is only logged on for 8 hours per day. The PC sits idle whilst users are in meetings, travelling, or performing other duties.

Low End User Service levels - through unplanned downtime due to OS/hard drive failures or virus and malware infections. End users are tied to one physical PC to access their set of applications. This can complicate organisational changes such as MACS (Moves, Adds and Changes) and limit the user’s flexibility. This works against initiatives to improve employee productivity, lacking the ability to make a users’ personalised corporate desktop available anywhere, anytime and from multiple devices.

Poor Data Management - maintaining control over data and information that resides on individual PCs is almost impossible. This provides a real threat to intellectual property or sensitive information. Lost or stolen laptops can end up costing organisations millions of dollars and expose the organisation to litigation. Government and industry regulations such as HIPPA, SOX and Basel II have are increasing demands on organisations to protect and safeguard private information, tightly control access to this information and provide a more trustworthy business environment

Each of these factors contribute to the high operating cost of the desktops.

The Virtualisation Solution

Virtualization decouples software from hardware, inserting a virtualisation layer [or hypervisor] that allows the running of multiple “virtual machines” [VMs] on a single server. This significantly increases the utilisation of the server and creates virtual machines that are isolated from each other.

The virtual machines share the benefit of powerful server and the isolation ensures that the applications behave well. If one machine becomes corrupted it will not affect the group.

By partitioning physical servers, into multiple virtual machines is redefining data centers. Each virtual machine is a complete system, with processors, memory, networking, storage. Multiple virtual machines can share physical resources and run side by side on the same server.

Operating systems and applications can run unmodified in virtual machines and can be managed as a group increasing utilisation and optimising your infrastructure.

More on Virtualization

Applying Virtualization To the Desktop

Just as virtualisation decouples software from hardware, desktop virtualisation separates the OS, applications and data from a local device, and encapsulates the image in a file run on a centralised server or servers in the data centre.

Multiple desktop VMs are isolated on fully utilised, powerful servers and managed as a group in the data centre. This architecture transforms a static desktop device into a portable stateless desktop environment that is highly available and accessible using almost any device over any network connection. They can be protected, backed up and resources can be dynamically allocated as needed.

The complete desktop image is captured, providing the user with the full feature rich experience as if the OS and applications where installed locally. The user interfaces are also the same.

Stateless Virtual Desktop

The transformed “stateless virtual desktop” has lead to the creation of a complete end-to- end integrated solutions. The most advanced is that developed by VMware – called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or “VDI”.

VDI

VDI is an end to end solution with no single point of failure. IT is based on VMware’s proven virtualisation infrastructure.

NEXT: VMWare Virtual Desktop Infrastructure [VDI]

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