Desktop Virtualisation - Considerations for going virtual

Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 15 April 2009 09:40

Business IT - Technology

Done your Server consolidation under virtualisation?  Perhaps it is time to consider those pesky desktops/laptops in your company.  This is an initial look at those desktop virtualisation considerations.

A company and its small IT team have recently completed a migration of both its LAN and Web Service server farms to an ESX (VMWARE) platform.  In doing so, they consolidated a moderate amount of physical servers, whilst allowing greater flexibility and separation of the server infrastructure.

The eyes of the tech team then turned towards those annoying desktops.  In a growing company, a non-growing IT team was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain multiple images, and sort through the myriad of disparate desktop issues that arose from an increased and geographically dispersed clientele.
 
One answer is to head down the virtualisation path, and whilst there are competitive products in the marketplace, VMWare’s View3 was chosen as the pilot product.  Before the pilot got management approval however, a business case needed to be presented.

Benefits from desktop virtualisation were qualified as:

* Better use of existing hardware, the existing the VM environment and for that matter the investment in VM knowledge within the technical team.

* Less Infrastructure - After desktop virtualisation, the need for high powered laptops is reduced. (Processing will be done on the powerful LAN servers; both CPU and HDD access should be improved.)

* No longer need to purchase laptops with Windows OEM installed, we can use any base operating system.

* Flexibility – applications can be upgraded across the company.  A wide variety of hardware, software (user profiles) and access methods can be supported (Web access or thin client)

* High availability

* Increased Security - Data is kept in a central storage location on a network server. Any data stored on offline desktops is encrypted and can be time bombed after a predefined period.  Given the nature of the company’s business, this was an extremely important requirement.

* Faster provisioning - Decreases resource 'idle' time for deployment of a new or replacement of faulty laptop.  Conservatively this was estimated to save in the order of 25% of a head-count.

* Some office issues identified as taking a day or more to fix, Spyware et al, can be fixed with a push of the 'refresh' button.

* Effectively provides desktop backup capabilities and DR capability.

* Integrates with Active Directory to utilise existing authentication, group policies etc.

The next step was quantifying the costs of implementation.

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