Desktop Virtualisation – Considerations for going virtual

Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 15 April 2009 10:40

Business IT - Technology

Rolling up VMWare View3 into an existing VMWare infrastructure is thankfully, relatively cheap.

View3 can be trialed for 60 days at no cost, perfect for a pilot stage.  If the pilot proves acceptable, the virtual desktops managed by View3 cost around US$150 per concurrent user.

Licensing is done as a pack of 10 or 100, with no discount for the 100 over the 10 pack.

Then there are the possible hardware costs.  If you can share SAN space with the current VMWare infrastructure, this is easy.  But there is still a quantification of the space required.

Even before the pilot begins, it is important to lay an educational foundation and profile your users.  Given the nature of how View3 manages virtual desktops, the user profiling is especially important.

You can mix and match, but your users will most likely fall into a small number of categories.

Users that predominately work in the office, either on a full blown desktop machine, or a laptop that rarely leaves the desk, are VMWare View3’s bread and butter, falling neatly into the low cost linked clone virtual desktop design that minimises resource use.

A second type of user requires their desktop to travel with them. Once again, these folk can fall into the linked clone category, so long as they understand the need to connect to the server before working.

A third user type needs offline access to their applications. This is experimental in the VMWare world and takes up a larger amount of hardware resources than the linked clone model.

Keeping the third type of user to a minimum is ideal.

Once all potential users are profiled and the project team is armed with the resource requirements, a cost justification to the bean-counters can be made.

So the pilot is about to begin.  Check back here for a further update as the virtual desktop pilot progresses.