PC Client Virtualization Gets Real

PC desktop virtualization—often dubbed thin-client computing—is not a new concept. Commercial desktop virtualization goes back some 15 years to the Microsoft® Terminal Server Edition of Windows NT 4.0. While the IBM® Virtual Client Solution, is not a revolutionary new product, it is a radically different solution to an old problem: How to cut computing costs with centralized management and not infringe on the user’s personal control of the computing environment.

In the broad continuum of virtualization, Windows Terminal Service, which is now a standard component of Windows 2003 Server, represents a class of server-based desktop computing that virtualizes the graphical user interface (GUI) of standard 32-bit applications. These products, which include offerings from Citrix and Tarantella, provide lower desktop computing total cost of ownership (TCO) through the ability to host multiple, simultaneous client sessions on a single server. Unfortunately, GUI virtualization, as a solution, is also at the crux of another problem.

All of these solutions are capable of directly hosting multi-user client desktops as a way of reducing the TCO of PC desktops. The rationale for these offerings should be familiar to any CIO struggling to cut operating costs: Just like storage, the cost of hardware and software to provision a desktop PC represents only a small fraction of the TCO for a PC. According to Gartner Research, most companies simply don’t employ rigorous best management practices with their desktop PCs. As a result, the indirect costs of a typical desktop PC are twice the direct costs.

Whenever management costs dominate a TCO equation, virtualization stands out as a prime solution. That’s because the management issues associated with an abstract logical representation of a resource are uniformly less complex than the real resource itself. What’s more, a simplified logical representation makes it easy to create standard management rules that apply to the particular needs of a site.

In the case of a desktop PC, Gartner projects that if IT were to virtualize the GUI of all PC applications and manage the software centrally, indirect IT costs would be cut in half. For IT, that represents a considerable amount of savings, as cutting indirect costs in half cuts PC TCO by about one third. Why then has thin-client computing, as manifested in GUI virtualization, not become the norm in enterprise PC deployment? The answer is politics. Within that answer is the rationale for a new look at PC virtualization as manifested in the IBM Virtual Client Solution.

PC—as in personal computer—politics is all about personalization, which is the decidedly blatant weak point of GUI virtualization. At a time when computing is all about end-user personalization and the dominant web-portal model is “my fill-in-the-site-name,” IT is not going to have an easy time arguing that one application interface fits all users. What’s more, a number of reliability and scalability issues begin to rise as multiple applications run on a single instance of the OS. Add to that the issues of scaling the number of users and the maelstrom of issues swirling around GUI virtualization begins to look harder for IT to navigate than the savings are worth. Nonetheless, the savings from centralized PC application management are very real and that means many sites are now leaving significant sums of money on the table.

Einstein once quipped that when solutions to complex issues become simple, that is when you hear God talking. The solution to PC management savings is an amazingly simple one, now that the technology is readily available: Virtualize the PC. If a virtual server is a good idea, why not extend that notion to a virtual desktop PC? That is the clever idea behind the IBM Virtual Client Solution.

In essence, the IBM Virtual Client Solution takes a full-featured desktop OS such as Windows XP and runs it on an IBM System x™ or BladeCenter® Server in a secure managed datacenter environment, utilizing a virtual machine via the VM®ware ESX Server, and simplifying login connections with the Leostream Virtual Desktop Connection Broker. Under this approach to thin-client computing, users retain all of the PC experience lost with simple GUI virtualization, while IT garners all of the savings brought about through centralized PC management. As a solution to PC politics, the IBM Virtual Client Solution is quite elegant.

First and foremost, users retain full control of the look-and-feel of their desktop environment. They also continue to enjoy all of the functionality associated with personal control, including audio and USB. In short, they retain full control of the logical resource. What’s more, users benefit from a dramatically new and powerful PC computing experience. With the IBM Virtual Client Solution, users are free to move about their physical surroundings and maintain secure access to their PC desktop from any client device at any time.
"ith the IBM Virtual Client Solution, users are free to move about their physical surroundings and maintain secure access to their PC desktop from any client device at any time."

At the same time, IT gains full management control of the physical resource. As a result, many of the performance and management tasks that now burden end-users are shifted to IT. With the IBM Systems Director family of platform management solutions, the IT operations staff has the tools needed to unify the management of virtual and physical systems, storage, and networks by exploiting industry standards and innovative integration. They have the capability to dedicate CPU, memory, storage, and network resources to virtualized desktop machines. That means users can be guaranteed high service levels even as their numbers increase, which is not the case when IT offers GUI virtualization alone.

With software and data managed centrally, IT provisioning, maintenance, security, regulatory compliance, and backup processes are all streamlined. Since a user’s logical PC is represented by a standard virtual machine image, rolling out a new user amounts to cloning that image with a file copy. Similarly, load balancing becomes dynamically migrating virtual machines from one physical server to another. With the new IBM Virtualization Manager Extension to IBM Director, IT operations managers are able to view and drill down on the relationships between resources, which greatly simplifies resource management tasks.

Finally, there is no need to leave a supercomputer’s worth of CPU resources to lie fallow on desktops every night. Servers used to support virtual desktop machines by day can be easily repurposed each evening for business performance computing tasks, such as sales data analysis and supply chain optimization. There is also the potential to leverage additional long-term gains through sophisticated autonomic management and IT process management. For example, automated provisioning with Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM) can be orchestrated through integration with the Remote Deployment Manager extension of IBM Director. In this way, a systems administrator can use TPM to help with everything from the bare metal deployment of a virtual machine to its software provisioning.