What are the business benefits of desktop/workspace virtualization?

Great analysis Mike, as a former Sun Engineer I can attest to the thin desktop solution. Business Week published an article in the past two years describing the Sun Solution and the associated savings.

Just to add to Mike's comment. The business benefits are many. Reduction in capital spending is not the greatest of them initially. However the savings really add up in management and operations areas such as software deployment, desktop maintenance, reduction in power, reduced cooling requirements, troubleshooting, time to repair, and administration costs to name a few.

Given a PC operates at 135 watts, and multiplying that by the number of desktops in your organization and it's no wonder we have global warming. A thin client uses about 10 watts and in many cases is a 100% solid state device (implies greater reliability) and it has no moving parts. The life cycle of the thin client is several times greater that a PC. (This is where the capital savings really happens) And refreshing the servers is a simple task that occurs with no downtime (think telephone). Also this creates less refuse for the local landfill.

There are other soft costs and benefits that are created by this flexible environment. By abstracting out the presentation and security aspects (ie. the man-machine interfaces) one can redirect the desktop to any valid and authenticated presentation device. Think how a simple telephone gets you access to the world to transmit voice. Now add a display, key board and mouse. The services are in the network. Your desktop is safe, secure and backed up all you need to do is dial it up.

This architecture also enables high availability and disaster recovery. Image trying to perform DR on 1000-10000 client desktops. Not an issue in a virtualized environment.

Hi, As far as virtual workspace goes, I am in total agreement with you folks. The current experiement with Cloud computing is going to take this issue to the its final conclusion one way or the other.

My take firstly is that on the desktop virtualization it is necessary evil if one has to work on multiple applications that are tuned to certain OS's and with more and more organisations looking at cost cutting, there might be some merit to this discussion. Typically what we find in the R&D Labs etc.

Secondly, I for one feel that based on the current experience that I have had with desktop virtualization it is more of a pain than benefit. As usual the issues of incompatibility crops up and one major issue is that of the generally ignored cost of software and its maintenance. So for every desktop virtualized you have multiple licenses and maintenance costs to be taken care off.

Thirdly the ability of user friendly interface to help users to switch between the guest OS's with least downtime is of paramount importance. I have had some experience with the Boot camp and the Parallels on Mac to run my legacy applications on a Mac. I found tht Parallels was a superior product. However I have not yet checked out the VMWare's version or the Linux Xen version.

I would wait for a virtualization management layer solution for desktop which allows for seamless switching between the guest OS's in terms of multiple windows which can be toggled at the user's convenience.

Then again would it make commercial sense to the user organisation adopting desktop virtualization, just save on the hardware cost and the utility cost while ignoring the software licenses, support, asset management, disaster recovery, training costs etc.

BTW there is a good hardware based virtualization solution around from N Computing which currently works on Windows platform, that could help bring down the hardware capital cost and utility cost if any organisation is looking such a solution.

I strongly feel that if the requirement is for a virtual workspace then there are host of solutions available which makes commercial sense. However when it to desktop virtualization goes, it is a looooooooooooong journey.

So I can see virtualization at the server, but like Prasanna mentioned unless I'm on a Mac and need Microsoft apps (what I was working with at previous company) I'm doing alright with what I have (a Windows system).

What type of operating system was used in the Sun example?

It seems that we are all in agreement that the business benefits of desktop/workspace virtualization are far and wide. I am going to agree with all that was mentioned.

For a moment I will try and think of the cons.

Compliance? are there any insitutions where data cannot be shared with others on the same physical equipment. Are the virtual desktops/workspaces shared with only the same company or shared with other companies as well.

Disaster Recovery? When it fails how much of it goes down. Has the technology team determined what the failover route will be. Is this a single threaded solution, does it have a single point of failure, how long will it take to restore. If data is lost what is the backup recovery time and how much productivity is lost during that time. I specialize in working with companies answering these sort of questions, comforting the FUD. Working with a single threaded solution in a virtual environment should be a never. create DRBD pairs, redundant sets of virtual controllers (esx, hyper-v, etc...) and redundancy on the storage level as well, multi-threaded.

Performance? If we have different users in different departments operating on specialized tasks do we have any potential problems here where a virtual may thrash I/O on resources causing all the virtuals within the same storage system to crawl. This can be overcome by properly designing a storage configuraton assigning multiple luns and raid volumes. (RAID 10 is the win) another area I am very familiar with.

Overall great report. Coming from a Senior Engineer, we use virtualization for our workstations and specialized application servers in our work place however we backup the FUD with redundancy designing multi-threaded from A-Z in the design.

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Nicholas O'Neil
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