Technical Architects Blog
Desktop Virtualisation
By Deiric Lynch
This is the first in a series of articles on desktop virtualisation. I will give a general introduction on what desktop virtualisation is; this is a scene setter so there is as little jargon as possible. Future editions will be more technical and describe the delivery of the desktop out to the various end devices, what happens in the data centre and setup of the initial desktop. I am going to keep this as generic as possible as the various solutions out there generally do the same thing. Later in the series I will discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of the various providers out there but before that let’s build a foundation.
Introduction to Desktop Virtualisation
The virtualisation world is moving from the server to the desktop. There has been a slow education of the IT world over the past 10 years of the features and advantages of Server virtualisation. Now, in 2010, there are very few organisations out there without some server virtualisation. Software vendors were resistant in the beginning but even the database vendors have accepted and support their products on hypervisors. So servers are done, what next?
Why would you want to continue the work from the server virtualisation on the desktops, there is nothing wrong with the existing PC desktops or laptops other than:
1 - They can be lost or stolen with sensitive data on board as well as those documents you meant to copy up to the server...
2 - You need to hand it over to IT to install new applications or antivirus or that upgrade to Windows 7 you want
3 - Hardware problems which in turn means working on a loaner PC which is analogous to a replacement car half the value of your own with stickers screaming “replacement from Joe’s garage” and of course no hubcaps. This car will get you from A to B alright but you won’t enjoy the experience as you can’t figure out how to tune the radio, there's no SAT NAV and space is tight in the boot for golf clubs or the buggy for the twins. Your loaner PC will have most of the apps you require but they will be in a different place and so on... we've all been there
Desktop virtualisation can answer all of the above needs and annoyances.
Desktop virtualisation in its simplest form takes a copy of an existing desktop, stores it centrally and designates this as a “golden image”. You now have the ability share this golden image as many times as you need, i.e. you can bring one clone/copy online or 100 or 1000 as virtual machines on your hypervisor and shut them down when not needed.
The clever bit is getting this desktop out to the users that need it on any available device. You provide the user with a piece of software on their end device which sees the virtual machine as if it were running on the local end device. This is much more sophisticated than the earlier screen scraping solutions such as VNC, etc - you can now plug in an iPod into the end device and up pops iTunes just as if it were local. You can of course restrict all of this if you want but this just illustrates the point.
Join me for the next edition where I get a bit more technical with delivery to the end devices.
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