A (server hosted) virtual desktop is a full, thick PC environment (“image”) run as a server virtual machine (VM) and accessed remotely from a thin client or other device. Many people may call this VDI, the term we at VMware coined when we launched the market, but in this post I’m going to focus on the virtual desktop and not on the infrastructure below it.
Virtual desktops were first deployed back in 2002 and market interest has accelerated over the last 4 – 5 years. Today, most organizations plan to deploy virtual desktops at some point for some of their users.
The appeal is that a virtual desktop offers a short cut to a thin client. A decade ago, server based computing appealed to many organizations as a way to centralize operations and management, but proved difficult to implement across whole application portfolios. Most organizations were able to centralize some applications, but very few were able to centralize all of them. As a result, they were unable to eliminate the desktop OS and so often ended up adding to, rather than reducing overall complexity.
With a virtual desktop, there is no need to re-engineer each application – you simply pick up the whole desktop bubble (the operating system and all that’s in it) and move it to the data center, where it runs as a virtual machine. When we launched our first full VDI offering in 2007, we made the broker software through which the user connects compatible with standard enterprise policy languages, so that our virtual desktops could be managed with the same management processes and tools as physical PCs – this is the “works with the existing plumbing” principle I described in my last post. This established a baseline that all market entrants have since had to satisfy.
VMware View, our virtual desktop product, offers two primary modes of deployment: dedicated, where each image is managed individually, and “pooled”, where the same image structure is used for all users. Pooled images deliver the highest levels of operational efficiencies and cost savings, but have traditionally only worked well for the more uniform user requirements. With improvements in “persona” approaches, these cost savings are being extended to more user types.
One of the main reasons that pooled virtual desktops have drawn so much attention is that their efficiency benefits increase with the number of users. Since each user image is managed in exactly the same way, a pooled virtual desktop is standardized and automated by default. This delivers diminishing marginal costs in operations, whereas a traditional PC comes at a constant marginal cost. In other words, every View user added to a deployment costs less than the previous one.
This attribute creates a natural drive to extend virtual desktop deployments to as many users as possible, but there are functional limitations: to the applications that will work well (since the user interface is separated from the point of execution); to the access devices that can be used (since a client is required to access the broker); to the types of users that can be supported (individual driver and application requirements are harder to support).
With VMware View 5, which we announced at VMworld last week, we’ve extended the range of addressability in all three of these key dimensions. Through improvements to our PCoIP protocol, we’ve further expanded the range of applications that work well and made dramatic reductions to cumulative bandwidth requirements. Our growing range of View clients means more access devices can be used. Persona management expands the scope of user types supported in a pooled deployment. More applications, devices and users – but at lower cost too: we’ve also exploited the latest developments in our market leading vSphere platform to drive down both operational and capital costs.
Any virtual desktop deployment can (and probably should) be expected to grow. But it is critical to stay within the boundaries of viable deployment at all times – stepping outside these will bring problems and cost penalties that quickly undermine the operational benefits. The best virtual desktop provider will always be the one who delivers the most robust product and that never encourages deployments to move too fast. Having spoken to very many organizations about virtual desktops during the last five years, I know that only VMware fits that description, but that’s hardly surprising – we invented this market: nobody understands it like us.
