UPDATED 18:33 EDT / AUGUST 30 2011

VDI Movement is Growing in both Private and Public Venues: VMware 2011

In the middle of the first day of VMworld 2011, three VDI experts gathered in the Cube to discuss the state of desktop virtualization and agreed in a discussion webcast live on SiliconAngle.tv that momentum is growing.

VDI consultant and VMware vExpert Jason Langone from MicroTech and Andre Leibovici, senior vSpecialist at EMC and former Asia/Pacific VDI professional services expert at VMware, agreed that the trials are growing and major rollouts are beginning in some organizations.

“We’ve seen it go from 50-person proofs-of-concept a couple of years ago to 100-person proofs-of-concept, and now it seems the 500-user mark is where people are starting to dip their toes into the pool,” Langone, who focuses on delivering Vmware-and Citrix-based VDI in the U.S. federal government, said.

Leibovici agreed and added that the New Zealand government is rolling VDI out across thousands of desktops, so desktop virtualization is moving past the proof-of-concept stage to full implementation in some environments.

Langone said that one thing driving the movement toward VDI in the federal space is concern over possible disasters. “I was in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, when the earthquake happened last week. Fifteen minutes later I was getting text messages from federal clients saying, ‘We are ready to do our SRM [vSphere Site Recovery Manager]. Should we hit the panic button?’ So I think SRM has been adopted as a proper DR by a lot of organizations.”

But this week, he says, “A lot of those same people are making the phone call and saying, ‘We’re finally ready for that VDI deployment we’ve been kicking around for the last 12 months.” After the earthquake they watched all their employees evacuate to their homes and realized that SRM may save the agency’s data but it doesn’t allow employees to be productive from home. VDI does.

Desktop-as-a-Service

Another thing they agreed on, however, is that desktop-as-a-service over the public cloud is a nonstarter. Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman, the third person in the group, noted that he is hearing a lot of talk about desktop-as-a-service and asked if the others were seeing any actual implementation.

“I think we are really moving toward desktop-as-a-service if its on the private cloud,” Leibovici answered. “But I’m not sure about it in the public cloud.”

“I think a lot of people are interested,” Langone agreed. “It’s a very sexy solution; people like the idea of having a Win 7 instance on demand. But a lot of folks who are saying, ‘We want to do desktop-as-a-service” really want applications on demand, not a desktop. There is some confusion there.”

Furthermore, he said, neither Citrix Desktop nor VMware View handle multi-tenant properly, which means they are not yet ready to support desktop-as-a-service.

Storage Issues

They all agreed that one of the main technical challenges of implementing VDI in production environments is managing the storage and IO. However, they saw signs that this is not an unsurmountable problem. Leibovici said that EMC finds that part of the answer is educating users to tune the storage correctly to meet the demands of desktop virtualization. “VDI has very specific storage requirements,” he said. “Companies that simply put VDI on their servers without understanding those requirements will have problems.”

Miniman said that flash storage, both from established vendors like EMC and startups with new flash-based technologies, offers the possibility of storage that can support large VDI installations. “It’s good to see some startups moving in there to help build for desktop virtualization,” he added.


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