Virtualisation - Next stop those pesky PC’s

There isn’t a day goes by when I don’t have a call from one solutions provider or another telling me how great virtualisation is and how we should all be doing it for a number of reasons. We as a firm embraced the technology a number of years ago consolidating what was becoming a large data centre down to a relatively small number of physical, very efficient, machines.

It’s one piece of technology that I have to say I was somewhat sceptical about at first. Were all those servers we had really only running at 10% load on average? The high consolidation ratios talked about from the leading virtualisation software companies were very optimistic, but we had little choice we were running out of room, cooling capacity and power.

Two years on and we haven’t looked back, it’s fair to say that it has delivered all the goals we were promised, much lower power consumption, less cooling, increased agility and improved service uptime.

So with our server estate running more efficiently, it seems natural to see if we can attempt to apply the same principles to the desktop environment. A Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), is the process of moving all the computing power that is normal executed on the desktop estate back into the data enter, running it on those highly efficient servers and leaving only a very small low power consumption device on the users desk.

To be fair the principles behind VDI have been around for a while and if you work in a Citrix or terminal server environment you might well be familiar with the idea of connecting to a remote session or PC.

Managing the desktop environment has always been a laborious task. Manually maintaining images and updating them each time a new application is released or a new piece of hardware is used, the intricate complexities of many applications interoperating with each other and the operating system. Fighting the inevitable slowdown of the desktop as more and more gets installed and removed.

VDI provides a solution to these issues by again separating the hardware and software. It’s a process of layering the operating system onto the hardware and then layering the applications on top of the operating system and finally any personalisation’s the user wants or needs. Each layer can be swapped out as and when required. This allows the desktop image to be virtually built each time the user logs in. Ask a Citrix administrator about the complex release management and change management procedures required to maintain stability of the server farm when even a minor application change is made and they will tell you it’s not simple process. Because, using VDI, no layer can talk directly to another it should be a simple case of swapping out that application, testing and release.

In addition because everything is now centrally controlled and run, management of the PC estate becomes much easier and benefits here include increased security and enforcement of central policies such as power management.

Lastly because we now have a flatten don’t fix technique to incident management we are going to see a shift in the dynamics of the average support team as we move from a reactive service to a more proactive one which will be a win for the business but a significant culture shock for those on the first line support.

It’s going to be an interesting few years in the desktop space with this move back to centralised computing, but one which if it can deliver like server virtualisation has will provide so many benefits and hopefully make a significant reduction in the impact IT has on the environment.

Chris Styles is IT manager at Pannone.