We've just released a white paper on a recent client desktop virtualization proof of concept study conducted by Intel IT. A primary objective of the study was to demonstrate that cost, complexity, and cycle time could be reduced through virtualization of the software components (operating system and applications) by decoupling them from the hardware platform. In the usage model that was evaluated, a virtualized IT build image was created and provisioned via DVD or a USB storage device to out-of-the-box personal computers from different OEMs.
Has anyone deployed a similar enterprise level hosted PC virtualization model with success? I'm very interested to hear where you believe the compelling business value to be in client virtualization, the challenges you have encountered, and how you may have overcome those challenges.
John
Mike - Sorry for the delayed response. I was fortunate to have had an extended summer vacation.
Traditional thin client models (e.g. terminal services, VHD) are not really viable for most segments within Intel since we are 70/80% mobile platforms and derive significant productivity from mobile usages given our culture of distributed/virtual teams. Reliable, robust external connectivity is not ubiquitous enough or cheap enough yet to rely exclusively on network-dependent desktop sessions. In addition, thin client architecture would be a hugely expensive transition for us in that our data center and network infrastructures are designed for distributed client computing. Finally, since we already need to invest in centralized manageability and service delivery capabilities to reap many of the benefits you describe, it makes more sense for us to begin our transition to the holy grail of virtual containers through application and OS streaming as these are universally applicable across Intel usages. VHD would be a niche model for us and we can derive the same benefits from app streaming for mobile usages and OS+app streaming for connected desktops. Ultimately we are looking to improvements in OS streaming technology, hardware virtualization, and other strategies to move us to a virtual container compute model even for mobile usages.
The security considerations I mentioned were not in regards to data storage; rather the concerns were that the usage we were testing envisioned a managed guest on an unmanaged (perhaps user owned) host. The idea of an unmanaged host raised concerns among our info sec folks that we are still exploring with them.
Usability challenges came down to performance and the fact that some people did not like the "fusion" of host/guest desktops (they preferred a separate window on the host containing the guest desktop). In addition, the need to patch everything twice (host and guest) presented some loss of productivity.
We're looking forward to continuing work in this space to address the concerns raised by this PoC. Even since the conclusion of our testing at the end of last year, we've seen big advancements in the products & capabilities we tested in terms of performance, security, manageability, etc. We also expect that the acquisitions and convergence of the products in this space will result in simplification and improvements on all of the challenges we've identified.
John