Dynamic Virtual Client

Upcoming webinar - Dynamic Virtual Client and Intel vPro Technology

michele.gartner@intel.com — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:40:04 GMT

Join us for this free webinar, where Clyde Hedrick and Kerry Johns-Vano provide a 1-hour introduction to Dynamic Virtual Client and Intel vPro Technology.

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/200059531

In the evolution of Client Computing model, if you ever wondered whether to go for rich client computing or thin client computing, you definitely want to attend this webinar. Dynamic Virtual Client webinar will go over the spectrum of client computing models and guide you towards the model that accomplishes centralized management, policy-driven data security with client-side computing.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

8:00 AM - 9:00 AM PST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

OnDemand Webinar: XenClient and Intel vPro Technology

michele.gartner@intel.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:38:06 GMT

The XenClient initiative has developed an architecture and roadmap for the Xen hypervisor to deliver powerful security, performance and manageability benefits to future virtualized client-side systems. The prevalence of Intel virtualization technologies on modern enterprise client devices heralds a sea change in the way that corporations will deliver desktops and applications to end systems, as well as opening up new use cases for centrally managed, secured and backed-up client devices that offer a rich, local computing environment to users.

In this session you will learn:

About the XenClient architecture
How you can provide a virtualized, high-performance environment for corporate applications without compromising security
About the XenClient roadmap

Click to view webinar.

Feet on the Street - vPro Series - Meet Dr Chuck Brown

josh.hilliker@intel.com — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:50:23 GMT

Dr. Chuck Brown is the director of the Emerging Compute labs in Intel. I was able to spend a few minutes with him today and talk about what he's working on.

Managed IT with netBoot/i from Double-Take software

priya.m.abani@intel.com — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:26:32 GMT

Intel has been working with multiple ISVs to implement Dynamic Virtual Clients. Implementing netBoot/i™ solutions from Double-Take software simplifies desktop management, and provides IT providers and end-users with the right mix of management capabilities (centralized storage, recoverability) without compromising user-experience even for the most demanding applications. Central management of operating system and applications reduces management complexity of patching multiple desktops and offers cost reduction and security by eliminating hard drives from desktops.

Building and maintaining computer systems is no easy task and information technology managers are constantly looking for better tools to reduce the total cost of managing their data centers and infrastructure. Storing both operating system state and data within the computer can cause management challenges such as storage over provisioning, data duplication as well as expensive and ineffective backup solutions. Shifting data storage to Storage Area Networks (SAN) provided numerous advantages in both hard and soft dollar cost savings. The final evolution of storage management is to separate the boot disks from systems and turn them into stateless compute devices. The netBoot/i™ technology separates state from compute devices and allows them to run from iSCSI SAN.

Check this technology out in the attached case study.

Case Study - OS Streaming and Application Virtualization at Providence Health & Services, Oreg

priya.m.abani@intel.com — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:03:16 GMT

Hi all,

Intel has been working with various companies on implementing the concept of Dynamic Virtual Clients. Driven by the need to control costs of desktop management, Providence Health & Services – Oregon (PH&S – Oregon) recently undertook an initiative to gain greater control and standardization of desktop configurations, while providing performance and flexibility to meet business unit needs. Goals for this initiative included maximizing system availability, reducing operating costs, increasing security, and better using IT time and resources to support business strategies rather than day-to-day maintenance.

After evaluating various computing models, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), blade computing, and terminal services, PH&S – Oregon deployed a pilot solution with streamed delivery of a centralized OS image using Citrix Provisioning Server* (Citrix PVS) along with application streaming and virtualization using Microsoft SoftGrid,* now called Microsoft Application Virtualization* (Microsoft App-V).

For PH&S – Oregon, this solution offered the lowest cost of ownership for both conversion and operation, met management and security requirements, and met or exceeded user expectations for boot time, application launch times, and performance.

Check it out in the attached case study.

Citrix Collaborating with Intel to Deliver Xen-based Client Virtualization Solutions

josh.hilliker@intel.com — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:59:52 GMT

http://joshprostar.blip.tv/#1696918

Case Study - OS Streaming and Application Virtualization at Financial Services Firm

priya.m.abani@intel.com — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:31:01 GMT

Hi all,

Intel has been working with various companies on implementing the concept of Dynamic Virtual Clients. Driven by the need to stay competitive under brutally challenging market conditions, a global financial services firm has mounted an innovative “stateless” desktop virtualization initiative, using streaming OS and application technology to make IT more agile and cost-effective. (The firm wishes to remain anonymous.)

In a previous effort to control desktop management costs for over 100,000 workstations, the firm implemented a solution based on VDI, which did not work well for certain segments – the power users and some knowledge workers. VDI also did not solve the underlying complexity issue of managing at least one desktop image for each user. To service the power users and provide a solution for centralized desktop image management, the firm implemented a “stateless client” architecture that centralized management and distribution of desktop images through real-time streaming technology, deployed on economical, scalable PCs or “virtual thin desktops.”

The firm’s stateless solution assembles desktop images on the fly from a set of master OS images combined with virtualized, streamed applications. This solution combines the security and control of server-based models with the high performance and multimedia user experience offered by rich client workstations.

Check it out in the attached case study.

Case Study - Scientific Application Streaming at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

priya.m.abani@intel.com — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:44:18 GMT

Hi all,

Intel has been working with various companies on implementing the concept of Dynamic Virtual Clients. As innovators among Harvard University’s IT community, the School of Engineering and Applies Sciences (SEAS) is an ideal environment for implementation of Application Streaming technology. Within SEAS, the office of Computing and Information Technology’s (CIT) CyberInfrastructure Labs (CI Labs) supports faculty, researchers, students, and staff by deploying and maintaining up-to-date, effective computing technologies.

With application streaming, applications are streamed on demand from the data center to the client, where they are executed locally. The goal of the scientific application streaming project, as outlined in the attached white paper, is to simplify the deployment of large, complex engineering and scientific applications to a highly diverse user population of around 1,000 students and faculty.

Initial results show install times decreasing from hours to minutes, as well as fewer problems caused by human error during complex installation and licensing procedures. As innovators among Harvard’s IT community, the CI Labs anticipates wider implementation of application streaming, both within its user base and across Harvard.

Check out the details in the attached case study.

Dynamic Virtual Client Seminar – How To Be Rich and Thin

scott1.e.smith@intel.com — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:40:07 GMT

Professionals running IT shops these days are facing a number of mandates regarding the relationship of PCs and servers: The CEO demands that data be secure. The government requires compliance to a plethora of laws governing data retention. The CIO says cut costs. The IT technician would love to have them manageable within an eight-hour day and without a trip in the rain. The end-user is amenable to anything as long as its mobile and he can get what he wants in nanoseconds. Until not too long ago, IT professionals wrestling with this dilemma could pick rich clients or thin clients, and be assured that a number of these mandates would go unfulfilled while good part of his constituency would be letting him know exactly where he’d gone wrong. Lately, however, a number of new client-server models have been emerging. Taking advantage of such technologies as streaming and virtualization, these "dynamic virtual client" technologies provide options for getting the benefits of both rich and thin clients. If you’re interested in knowing more, Intel’s expert is this area is Mike Ferron-Jones, director of Dynamic Virtual Client Technology. He’ll be giving a seminar on dynamic virtual clients, including some that have emerged in just the past few months, in a , on Wednesday, December 10 from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. PST. You can find the webcast here or on the viewer below. Log on a few minutes early as there’s a short registration. Best yet in these financially troubling times, the price is right – it’s free.

PC Models Fit For a Duchess

scott1.e.smith@intel.com — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:03:07 GMT

The Duchess of Windsor once famously quipped, “You can never be too rich or too thin.” If she was a modern day IT director, however, she might be lamenting that neither is satisfactory. End-users want their PCs rich, powerful and mobile, and most IT managers would like to give them what they want. However, given budget constraints, nightmares of lost laptops brimming with customer records and the job of keeping applications uniform across an entire fleet of PCs, many IT managers might, albeit with regret, conclude, “Make mine thin, manageable and secure.” To many IT professionals, this may seem the best answer: equip as many end-users as possible with thin clients, and store the images and data on a central server where they can be maintained and guarded. As we know, that works fine in some instances, but today’s end-users are too mobile, too performance oriented and too stubborn to part with their high-powered, go-anywhere-anytime PCs. My Aunt Ruth, a duchess to me, used to tell me, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” As Intel’s PR guy for business PCs, that’s what I’ve also been learning from Mike Ferron-Jones about client computing. Mike heads up Intel’s research into a number of different models for client computing or what he calls “dynamic virtual clients.” The idea is to give IT managers what they want – the efficiency and security of managing client applications, data and even OSs on a server, but without a large datacenter buildout – while at the same time offering in-kind benefits to end-users – the performance and mobility they’re accustomed to. Simply put, the best of rich and thin. Mike accomplishes this with various combinations of virtualization, streaming and storage, all with a financial objective commensurate with IT’s dwindling budgets. If you’re interested in learning more, Mike has been asked to talk about “Dynamic Virtual Clients – How To Be Rich and Thin” at BrightTALK’s Virtualization Webcast, which airs here at 3:45 p.m. PST, Tue. Nov. 4.

If you can’t make that, there’s plenty to be learned on the Intel Emerging Compute Model Forum. Check them both out. As Mike likes to say (yeah, there’s one more) about dynamic virtual clients, “You can have your cake and eat it too.”

Dynamic Duo: Intel® vPro™ Technology & Microsoft Application Virtualization Enable “Wake and Update” Capability for Virtual Applications

rde@intel.com — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:56:10 GMT

Blog moved to...

http://communities.intel.com/openport/blogs/proexpert/2008/10/24/dynamic-duo-intel-vpro-technology-microsoft-application-virtualization-enable-wake-and-update-capability-for-virtual-applications

Better Together - vPro & Microsoft Application Virtualization

josh.hilliker@intel.com — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:50:15 GMT

In this video Mike Ferron-Jones & Edwin C. Yuen discuss the following:

#1. Manage the applications with Microsoft Application Virtualization

#2. Manage the clients with Intel vPro Technology

#3. Manage the Enterprise with Microsoft System Center

Citrix Software with Intel vPro Technology

jason.a.davidson@intel.com — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:21:28 GMT

Citrix and Intel have been working together to deliver a solution that builds on both companies expertise. The end-to-end solutions, application delivery, and virtualization software that Citrix provides combined with the manageability, performance, and security from vPro deliver a novel solution. The solution allow the IT OS build to go through a secure or trusted boot, where the hardware and software used to launch the OS is measured for integrity before the program executes. The OS can be streamed off a remote server, and the end-user gets the rich client side local execution experience.

In this video, Citrix Software's Paul Hahn, Director of Business Development / Virtualization & Management Division, and Matt Edwards, Product Manager, talk about how Citrix Systems is developing products for OS/App Streaming on top of Intel vPro technology. You will see that the virtualized, measured, and streamed OS is able to still render and rotate a rich CAD drawing.

Google Chrome & the Compute Model.

jason.a.davidson@intel.com — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:56:05 GMT

Like many others, I have downloaded Google's Chrome Browser (using it to write this blog), and gave it a try. Of course, the first thing people are focused on is the UI and visible features... After reading the comic book explanation (the team did an awesome job at describing the architecture via a comic book - very unique idea), I think people need to look at what this browser really is - it’s not just a browser, it’s a web execution client.

First, they went away from launching a bunch of threads and went to processes, they are extending a well know operating system fundamental, making the browser similar to a sub OS of your OS (one that does not have to care about drivers and such). They went for the overhead of the process model to focus on scalability and stability. Both of these have to be fundamentals if Google Gears is to provide content to this web execution client, as who wants to run a cloud application and have your browser crash, run out of memory, or suffer from many of the other common limitations of browser-based applications (very few truly rich applications run purely in a browser).

Other features that seem to be radically different for this web execution client are the virtual machine manager used to execute Java script, the garbage collection method, the scalable user interface, and the way they are doing the developer testing. They have really taken a different approach here, an approach more focused on how things execute over being an web page rendering engine. The developer testing concept is very neat, they are leveraging the core of Google to test their builds against the most commonly viewed sites, this gives instant feedback about real world usages (but no testing is ever enough, right?).

Now how does a new browser release get into blog on compute models? The way I look at it, this is really a prime time client for executing cloud programs, Google Gears or others. The way they made the browser to not be limited in its processing capabilities and coupled that with common computer science stability models, the browser (even if not launched as a browser) is a prime candidate to become our interface to the rich application capability to cloud computing.

However, my biggest worry with this model is how the application verifies that the virtual machine manager and the other core services of the browser integrity have not been compromised. Is their a TXT style measurement of this browser? If cloud is going where people think it is, I am going to want my client execution engine to be trustworthy as possible.

From my first look, great job Google team. What are your thoughts?

-Jason A. Davidson

Is your compute model choice green? A holistic approach…

jason.a.davidson@intel.com — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:26:51 GMT

In my tenure at Intel, I have had the pleasure of walking into major companies, educational institutes, non-profits, and government agencies to talk technology with many great people. “How green is this solution” is a topic on many minds lately – no matter which topic of discussion. Being an engineer by trade and scientist by education, I will typically dive into the details of around each component’s power consumption and the discussion ends with some simple math multiplying a number of units by their thermal numbers. However, there is so much more to the overall impact, and as I walk in and out of these locations, I am always amazed at the number of larger issues with much larger impacts that are unresolved or overlooked. Reading the book “[Living Like Ed: a Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life|http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/livinglikeed/index.html]” by Ed Begley Jr., inspired me to approach some of these topics, and to similarly classify items by their degree of difficulty to implement – easy changes, not-so-big changes, and big changes. Additionally, I will belooking at the overall impact that compute model choices can affect. However, I will leave the topics beyond the realm of compute models to experts such as Ed Begley Jr.

Corporate Recycling, it can be an easy change:

Before I dive into any of these subjects, recycling should come as an essential component to every one of these solutions – it should become part of your culture, the stockholders will most likely appreciate the frugality. If your purchasing new equipment, you need to be thinking about what you can do with the old equipment, sometimes the answer is to donate the equipment to charities, sometimes it needs to be disposed of, but rarely does that require it fill a landfill. As an example, everywhere that Intel operates, more than 70% of all waste is recycled. I am not suggesting you need to achieve this overnight, Intel has been working on this since 1971…it is a gradual process. Start by looking at what the biggest waste items are from your company and get creative – is it finding a use for all those coffee grounds, finding ways to reuse packaging material when shipping your products, or simply implementing recycle bins and growing employee awareness.

Here is a great video which highlights how Intel practices corporate recycling:

Pure power consumption items:

Monitors

I have yet to find a location that I have visited where I cannot find that amongst the rows of office workers, several are still using CRT monitors – and many times they are not even the energy efficient CRTs. Simply moving these users from CRTs to LCD can have a profound impact on power consumption. Consider a typical 17” CRT will consume around 80 watts, and a 15” LCD is around 25 watts (these have similar viewing areas). For any user working behind one of these outdated CRT monitors, we need not discuss any other aspect of power savings at their desk until this is fixed, no compute model savings are looking to give you 55 watts back with such a simple solution. Added to this are well-known benefits around increased worker productivity when moving from CRT to LCD due to eyestrain reduction, glare, distortions, flicker, and visual search time improvements. As far as I can see it, switching out these monitors is an easy change, it is in the same vein as moving from incandescent to compact fluorescents light bulbs. Their are even HVAC efficiency changes when these changes happen on a large enough scale (less heat put off by the monitor equals less cooling needed from the HVAC – and in winter the heating produced by your HVAC system I am going to assume is more efficient than the heat being produced by that CRT). http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/PUB/LCD_vs_CRT_AH.pdf

However, a big change item enabled by the CRT to LCD upgrade comes in the realm of building design. The distance an employee sits from an LCD is the same as the CRT, however the space needed behind the LCD is far less than that of a CRT – LCD monitors even have direct wall mount options. This gives space designers the ability to decrease desk depth and develop creative solutions around ergo designs. This results in more compressed, configurable, and/or productive work environments. The weight reduction on a given office floor can give some relief to building designers as well (average CRT weights 40-45 lbs, and the similar LCD is 6-8 lbs – multiply this by the number of workers in a building, let say 1000, yields a couple tons removed from a single floor). Is their a way to utilize the weight and heat to balance locations that are often constrained already, such as your server room? It’s worth looking into.

Telecommuting

The subject of telecommuting in general causes various reactions – from the employer who has witnessed abuse of the telecommuting freedoms to discussions around increased employee focus and higher output, the reaction and debate on this subject will continue, just as it has around anything from solitaire to YouTube and social network use. Regardless of the outcome of these debates, telecommuting can have an overall world effect on the number of employees on the road to and from the office each day. Being that most people tend to take a transportation method that is far from efficient, this alone can be a net positive impact. I have heard some government employees are encouraged to spend 1 day each week working from home (pending their job allows them to do this) simply to reduce the environmental impact. However, the debate is still out on the efficiencies in power consumption regarding heating and cooling a single residence verses several employees in an office environment, and the infrastructure costs to support more remote verses local employees. The benefits of mobility in your compute model can definitely benefit the environment – at the least, mobility offers the flexibility to consider various work environments (e.g. what would be greener than a person using a laptop outside using solar power?).

Power policies

Often power policies have taken energy efficient configurations and pushed them another 20% beyond what is already seen as good. When applied down the wire over manageability interfaces such as can be done on an Intel® vPro™ Technology enabled client, they are easy to deploy and quick to update when needed. You can decide to simply turn off the unused computer, wake it up and update it when needed, and then return it to the low power states. On the other hand, you can utilize the processing power of that vacant machine to run a distributed compute environment using an IDE redirection operation, further reducing the loads on your data center and switching the watt per calculation onto inexpensive devices. Isn’t this the whole argument that drove RAID technology – the I in RAID stands for inexpensive, we took inexpensive drives and made redundant copies, much like we can do with the relatively inexpensive computations of these vacant client machines.

Data Center Consolidation via Virtualization, DC Racks, and other things inside those glass rooms…

If no one has looked into this area yet at your organization, it may be time to visit your local datacenter and see what is going on. Chances are the ladies and gentlemen running your datacenter are already plugged into these topics, as they are probably spending a large budget every year just to keep those servers that you never see humming along, money well spent on temperature and climate control, money spent on power consumption, etc. Lets face it, unless you are someone who understands the difference between 1U, 2U, and 4U and knows what happens when the halon system is engaged, then you should get your teams that do know about such things looking at The Server Room. There are many fantastic advances in the last few years that can drastically decrease the power consumption, reduce the cooling needs, and increase the manageability and reliability of your server room.

Compute Model Debates:

The reason I call this section “debate” is that various individuals, corporations, analysts, and product vendors spend much time debating about which of these is greener. The argument usually stays within the simple math as I described before, but the real answer I believe should extend into the larger, holistic, picture. All of these solutions fit into the big changes category, as they require establishments to modify the way they operate, often involving the acquisition of new equipment and software, and typically requiring end-users to receive some training to function productively in these environments. For more information on these compute models you should read the presentation at: Compute Models Explained

Fixed Location: Terminal Services, Virtual Hosted Desktops, Blade PCs, and Web-Based Apps

I am grouping all of the compute models that move large amounts of computation from clients and place them on server(s), as they all have a very similar green impact with slight nuances related to each one. Often this group of computing wins out quickly with simple math:

Current: 20 client computers running at X watts + server running at Y watts

Thin-client: 20 thin-client computers running at almost no watts + server running at Y watts

This always looks great, and why not, you are reducing the wattage on the item that is being multiplied. Too good to be true? This does not account for several key items with these calculations. The scenario does not look at how many clients the one server handled before and after the switch. The change pushes more computing demands on the server, and reduces the demands on the clients. In the current scenario, the server may have been handling very limited calculations, and could have stretched to thousands of clients. Anyone who has priced servers and supported them knows that the cost per calculation that you pay on a server is far greater than the cost per calculation on a client. Servers require redundancy, are often located in raised floor climate and temperature controlled environments, typically are allowed to operate at up to 50% capacity before more are added to the mix, are supported by disk arrays which are also climate controlled and redundant, have built in fans with redundant fans, built in power supplies with redundant power supplies… All of this is to make sure that you, the end user, never experiences downtime. On the other hand, your desktop or mobile client is built with the end user in mind, it can often handle limited shocks, a wide range of temperatures, humidity, and electro-magnetic interference. However, it does not have dedicated employees supporting it as the server does, and does not require a special room. I have yet to hear a client discussion where we talk about five or six 9’s of uptime – client computers simply reboot much more often.

The real equation should read something like the following:

Current: 2000 client computers running at X watts + server running at Y watts

+ server room HVAC

Thin-client: 2000 thin-client computers running at almost no watts + 200 servers at Y watts

+ server room HVAC expanded to support 199 more servers

Is this a net wash, increase, or reduction – that depends on how constrained your datacenter already is, what part of the world you are located in (do you have some glaciers nearby), and several other factors. I am not saying it is not always a net reduction of power, but the equations used are often over simplified, they have to take a holistically approach to each environment to determine the true merits.

Off Network Options: Distributed, Rich Client, Virtual Containers, Application Virtualization and Streaming

The second group I am going to split my debate into is the group that supports mobility and retains computation on clients. Many of these models support moving computations between the server and client as dictated by policies and system capabilities. However, in general each of these models enables the server component to scale to a much larger number of clients, and when reaching server capacity can use policies to turn up client compute loads. The same calculations apply in these environments where you include HVAC costs for the increased server demands. However, the numbers of servers increased in these scenarios are much smaller. Don’t just take my word for it, follow this linkto a study done by Fraunhofer Institute

Conclusion:

No step is too small…changing behaviors, deciding which solutions are right for you, and reaping the benefits of growing greener is a gradual process, one for which we all should strive. With each option we need to be looking at what the larger impacts are – what does it mean to productivity, security, manageability, and is now the right time to gain adoption for this change?