Published on: October 19th, 2009
Hosted Desktops That Don’t Need to be Hosted
But a drawback is most companies must build a new infrastructure or greatly expand their current hardware to host all the back end desktops.
Hosted desktop solutions seem to be gaining mind share and rack space these days, and with good reason. There are many positives to this type of architecture. Centralized administration, upgrade, management, and backup just to name a few.
But a drawback is most companies must build a new infrastructure or greatly expand their current hardware to host all the back end desktops. Discretionary IT dollars are a thing of the past so a solution must be absolutely better and less expensive to make wide scale changes. It needs to be in order to unseat whatever is in place. And if it is more expensive, it must have a spectacular upside, something that is of real value to the IT department so they are willing to part with the extra money because it is genuinely worth it.
I worked with a school on a hosted desktop solution once that really wasn’t hosted. They had tried server-based computing but it didn’t meet the needs of their graphically intense lab users. So with one 3U server (and internal storage) they will be able to meet the need of having 6 different desktop workloads available on demand to these users. Each end point computer runs the workload assigned to it using the local CPU and Memory, all from a single disk image that is on the server. This one 3U server could support hundreds of end point machines so you can see we don’t need a giant scaled out back end infrastructure. We don’t even need a hypervisor on the client or the server side.
I think that this is a pretty cool way to give the end user the power of local machine performance and we as administrators get one image to manage on a single windows server. Not very complicated. A second windows server adds HA and failover. Drag and drop image updates and upgrades. And no compromising info has to live on the end point device. So you can use your existing hardware on the desktop to accomplish this. As desktops fail you simple replace them with a thin client.
While I am sure that it will be cool, we don’t have to wait for the client side hypervisor. When it gets here your current desktop hardware probably won’t support it. You could use this type of solution in any environment. It can work with hypervisors if you have them, we can even get remote users connected. That’s another thing I like about it, you can leverage this solution in so many different ways.
Some people think that VDI is complicated and expensive. It doesn’t have to be. Let me know what you think.
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October 19, 2009 at 10:33 am
So essentially – don’t virtualise, manage the image better?
As was mentioned on Brian Madden’s site its a pity that Citrix doesn’t allow Provisioning server to be a separate product. I see that Double Take have an alternative solution.
Mind, such desktop management works fine for devices on the lan; but how do you support remote and mobile users?
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October 19, 2009 at 11:22 am
It’s not that you don’t have to virtualize, Provisioning Services puts a new spin on both physical and virtual deployments. It is a very cool stand alone technology but I can also see how it will become folded into everything virtual because it allows us to manage the image better. So there are other things out there that do almost the same thing and we will see which one gains wide spread acceptance. For Citrix it is PVS.
As for remote and mobile users, WAN users can get an image on their side of the link. Mobile users may have to wait for the client side hypervisor, or just stream the apps using XenApp. PVS does not have to be the only Citrix technology leveraged. That is why I am liking the flexcast announcement. It may take a little bit to get traction, but the ability to get an app any way I choose is very powerful, they just have to get a licensing model that works.
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