OverviewWe have been hearing lot of buzz about Desktop Virtualization and we wonder if it’s hype or reality. Desktop virtualiza-tion holds the promise of solving many of the desktop management problems that have been plaguing IT since PCs first began to multiply in corporations in the early 1980s. Everyone is talking about desktop virtualization, but does it really deliver the promised savings, se-curity, and flexibility? It has been touted as the “next big thing” in IT, but has it really lived up to the hype around it? Enterprise customers have seen benefits from adopting Virtualization for server consolidation. Virtualization has also been used to simplify storage manage-ment to improve resource utilization and ensure high availability. With the success within the data center (servers and storage) environment, many ven-dors are pushing the similar technology approaches for addressing the Desktop virtualizationIf we take the customer requirements and IT environment for desktop virtual-ization, one would find very interesting tough problem to solve as the different constituents to satisfy have conflict-ing or opposing requirements. But at the same time, the main vendors in this market are pushing the products with the same approach that was used for Server consolidation. There is a big disconnect between the customers and vendors in this regard. Unfortunately even the new startups in this space are taking the technology driven approach

instead of addressing the customer requirements. Many enterprises have initiatives and are actively looking for desktop virtu-alization products. The right Desktop Virtualization products / solutions cer-tainly bring impressive benefits once the industry matures to bring the cohesive products taking the customer and user requirements into account.Analysts project big opportunity for Desktop Virtualization market ($2B to $10B). There are many green field mar-kets in developing countries ready to ex-plode if the products meet the customer price points and features.

Challenges of Existing Traditional Desktop computing:Enterprise IT is under immense pres-sure to centralize desktops and increase productivity while also reducing costs and ensuring control over information assets, complying with security regula-tions, and standardizing data sharing practices across the enterprise.

This apart, another major challenge for traditional desktop computing, is the question of mobility. Statistics reveal that 50% of business workers are mobile at any given time (International Tele-work Association) and that by 2010, over 70% of US workers will be mobile (IDC #34124). While this is the scenario, tra-ditional desktop centralization models

cannot accommodate mobile laptop users, and they also present challenges in terms of overall end-user experience and application compatibility.

On the other hand, enterprises also have growing concerns about endpoint security and data leakage. IDC analysts state that 60% of enterprise confidential information resides on the endpoints and 42% of data breaches are a result of a lost device, including laptops and mobile phones. Laptops rank first in this regard.

Desktop Virtualization has to Satisfy Three Constituents:

When it comes to Data Center oriented infrastructure like Servers, storage etc.., primarily IT is the direct user of the resources to provide IT services. But for Desktop Virtualization initiatives, the scenario is different and complex as the users of desktops are employees or other users. The usage of the systems is not just limited to enterprise premises. Enterprises are also under tremendous pressure to meet the security and com-pliance for data leakage issues.

The key constituents that need to be addressed at various levels, for Desktop Virtualization:

At the CIO Level: •

Standardization is a primary require-ment. A key concern here is that it is not easy to bring legacy desktops to server side. So how to achieve standardization? - This is a major is-sue that needs to be addressed. The next concern is about saving costs. Whether virtualization will help in saving costs remains debatable, as virtualization by itself involves high operational costs. The question of manageability is another important element. Since systems manage-ment tools deployed to monitor the enterprise IT infrastructure were not built with virtualization in mind, it becomes complex to implement. Also another issue here is whether the people in an enterprise have the essential skills to deal with virtualiza-tion or not.

At the • Employee / User Level:

While more and more business work-ers are becoming mobile, desktop virtualization is harder to achieve. Also, with employees, experience expectations are higher than current. Employees and users are more and more want to mobile thin clients and want to run new rich media applica-tions. This apart, another concern is that there is always resistance from employees to process changes and environment changes. These need to be tackled effectively.

At CISO • (Chief Information SecurityOfficer)Level:

With mounting data security issues reported frequently, risk manage-ment and data leakage at the endpoints are two most important concerns to be addressed.

Market Trends – Thin Clients, SaaS models, Energy savingsq Rapid growth in new client devices

• Thin Clients, Netbooks, iPad, vPad, WePad, Smart phones, Web-connected TVs

q More and more employees want mobility.q Focus on Energy Savingsq New delivery models

• Software as a Service (SaaS) w/o installation• On-demand delivery w/o

management overhead

User Priorities - IT Priorities (opposing requirements)q User priorities (Productivity, new capabilities, New devices)

• Flexible computing, new thin de-vices• New media rich applications• Mobility• On demand delivery

q IT priorities (Centralize and Control)

• Centralize / Standardize – Simplified management• Reduced TCO• Business Continuity / Disaster recovery

Why the current Desktop Virtualization products are not getting customer traction?Most of the current solutions are not true Desktop Virtualization implemen-tations. Since they primarily emerged from the success of technologies used in Server Consolidation (Machine Virtual-ization)orApplicationVirtualization, they only present virtual experience using thin clients. These solutions don’t address all the customer requirements. The VDI/Thin client solutions might work well for task workers, but major portion of knowledge workers will object for these types of solutions. The other startup products, which were de-signed/ architected based on the similar hypervisor based product implementa-tion don’t satisfy the cost and experi-ence requirements that Enterprise IT is looking for.

To summarize:

Current Desktop Virtualization solutions are primarily around VDI or few startups that have client centric solutions using the similar hypervisor (Virtual Machine) or Application Virtualization tech-nologies that don’t meet the customer requirements for cost and experience as these technologies originally were meant for data centers.The current solutions which come from the success of server consolidation do not satisfy requirements of the three constituents above. There is no single common solution that satisfies the different types of desktop users.

What is the Ideal Vir-tual Desktop Solution?

Most of the users use office applica-tions like MS Office or Adobe Photo-shop, they like the rich features native experience known interfaces; of course this comes with cost and complexity in provisioning and managing, locked to our own devices.

We have seen the success of new web/cloud based applications like Gmail that are independent of any OS and HW device. These applications are delivered to users with lot more flexibility and at a fraction of cost compared to desktop applications. At the same time Web/Cloud based delivery models don’t work for compute intensive graphics applica-tions that the users are looking for more and more.

The ideal solution should deliver the Desktop Workspace to users the way Web applications are delivered.

1. User desktop/workspace is indepen-dent of OS and HW device, delivered to any machine with no installation on demand. i.e. the desktop was never installed on any machine but follows you like faithful dog, where ever user goes whatever machine he/she uses and gives the same experience of running on his/her own machine.

2. Software isn’t installed on PCs, but rather lives as a single copy on the network, accessible to millions of us-ers, a world in which one single system administrator supporting that one copy would also be supporting those millions of users.

3. It should also enable the new soft-ware delivery models like rent or subscribe for one’s favorite application like adobe photo shop, or a delightfully graphics rich game for an hour, a day, or a week, just the exact time you need, and run it on any machine anywhere, with all the speed and availability you are used to from a program installed on your own machine.

4. Simplify management of user desk-tops/workspaces to the bone like web applications management.

An Ideal Virtual Desktop Solution should be able to:

Meet the TCO and Experience require-ments: Ideal solution should help IT reduce the Desktop Management with minimal business process changes.

Address Mobility: It should be able to separate the physical and logical desk-tops so that a user’s desktop is portable and accessible from any machine at any location with or without connectivity

Ensure Control: It should give the enterprise complete control over what applications can be loaded to the virtual desktop.

Allow Flexibility: It should give users true online and offline access to their virtual desktops from any PC.

• Virtual desktops should provide optimization so that the access from LAN/WAN should not degrade the

performance

• The offline model should detect unauthorized desktop access and also data leakage issues. And it should allow offline work to be synched with central IT storage with ease.

How do we achieve the ideal Solution?1. Decouple user workspace away

from the OS, make the user work-space independent of target OS. We really mean this. That is how the web applications work; a simple browser specific to OS takes care of the avail-ability of that application on the target device and OS. Seems impos-sible, we need innovation to achieve great results.

2. Extract and manage all commonapplications and data as single physi-cal copes for all users in central place. Again impossible, but that is what makes the costs to go down to the

bone.

3. Deliver the workspace to any endpoint for execution without overloading the target device with unnecessary virtual layers, leave almost 100% of CPU and memory for user applications and data – This is the only way user can get their native experience

4. The workspace should be available even if the user chooses to be offline or an OS that is not meant for the ap-plications. Seems incredible, but can’t sacrifice user experience

5. More importantly the ideal solutionshould take into account the new mobile and thin devices with low resources.

While focusing on the TCO to the bone this solution also should minimize the power requirements.