The virtualization juggernaut rolls on. After storage and
servers, virtualization has set its sights on storming yet another
bastion of high costs and avoidable waste in the IT
organization—desktops. Syed Rizwan, DGM, IT, Siemens
Information Processing Services (SIPS), a leading provider of BPO
services, is betting on desktop virtualization to manage his PC
fleet, and bring under control the twin problems that had been
plaguing him for a while—underutilization of desktops and
high maintenance costs. 
Desktop virtualization essentially involves centralizing
applications at the data center making management and provisioning
easy. According to Gartner, desktop virtualization could outpace
server virtualization in the coming years.
The ubiquity of the desktop environment means desktop
virtualization technology is not restricted to any particular
vertical. However, in India, as the SIPS example hints, the BPO
industry seems to be in the first adopter mode, with many companies
either evaluating or adopting the technology.
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Rajendra Deshpande, CTO, Intelenet Global
Services
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“There are some BPOs which are carrying out proof-of-concept
on this technology. We are in talks with major players in the
desktop virtualization space like HP,” revealed Rajendra
Deshpande, CTO, Intelenet Global Services, a BPO organization
headquartered in Mumbai. Anwer Bagdadi, Senior Vice-president and
CTO of CFC India Services, another Mumbai-based BPO, acknowledges
that there is a definite need for desktop virtualization. “We
are currently in the stage of server and storage consolidation and
virtualization. Going forward, we would graduate to desktop
virtualization,” he said.
Typically, BPO units in India operate at night. As a result,
daytime finds most of the desktop systems idle. Dedicated desktops
are not exactly cheap, hence hosting applications at a centralized
location can provide more efficient use of resources and improve
overall manageability and control.
“We have conducted studies that provide up to 80 percent
better utilization of resources,” said Jim Lenox, Director,
Asia South, VMware, a leading player in the virtualization software
space.
With well-connected servers, enterprises could have a better plan
for data recovery, mobility and flexibility using a virtualized
desktop environment. Management issues like reconnecting user from
machine to machine, monitoring the health of the systems,
maintenance of administrative software, and BIOS updates are
automatically taken care of.
Maintenance panacea
As security threats like virus, malware and spyware add to their
woes, desktop maintenance has become a major headache for IT
organizations.
“Desktop virtualization can help create a more secure and
centralized environment. It takes all the controls and brings it
under one umbrella,” said Deshpande.
For example, if an organization has 500 desktops with one
maintenance engineer dedicated for 100 desktops, it would require
five such engineers. When all these desktops are moved to a
virtualized environment centrally, only one engineer would be
required for server maintenance at the backend, thereby saving
labor costs.
Desktop virtualization also promises to bring down power
consumption. Industry reports indicate that system power
consumption of an idle enterprise desktop varies anywhere between
40 and 80 watts. If an enterprise has 100 desktops, the power
consumed would be in the range of 4,000-8,000 watts.
“Desktop virtualization can reduce power consumption by at
least 25 percent,” said UK-based Paul Dunford, Director of
Channel and Alliances, ClearCube Technology, while speaking to
Network Computing over phone. In the aforementioned example, this
would translate into a power consumption of 1,000 to 2,000 watts.
Thus, apart from lowering power consumption, enterprises can also
reduce electricity bills.
According to Arun Rao, Business Manager, Client Virtualization,
Personal Systems Group, HP India, “The savings on each
virtualized desktop over a period of five years would be around Rs
50,000,” That amounts to Rs 50 lakh for 100 virtualized
desktops during the same period.
Desktop virtualization also enhances information security. Both IT
users and vendors agree that security policies can be easily
managed as the control is moved from the desktop and placed on a
centralized location.
“There are processes in place that encrypt the data stream
from the virtualized desktop to the data center, so even if there
is a sniffer around to decode and analyze data packets, all it
would manage to get is garbage,” said Ajit Achar, Senior
Architect, Software Practice, Sun Microsystems.
Vendors opine that hardware obsolescence too can be tackled through
this technology. Devices like hard drives, optical disks and fans
have physical movements that make them prone to failures. The mean
time between failures (MTBF) of such machines is around 4-5 years.
On the other hand, a virtualized desktop would have MTBF of 10-20
years.
“One virtualized desktop buying cycle is equal to two normal
desktop buying cycles, so with desktop virtualization there would
definitely be savings on the second buying cycle,” said
HP’s Rao.
Options play
Enterprises can choose from one the various methods available
for virtualizing their desktop environment. In a server-based
computing approach, the desktop has a virtualization layer
installed as an application and connects to the server hosted at
the back-end for device support and physical resource management.
In this scenario, the ratio of user and machine is many : one.
On the other hand, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
method, the virtual desktop on the client side connects to the
server that is broken into multiple virtual machines (VMs). A group
of users would therefore connect from the desktop to one of the
VMs. Each operating system (OS) can have a customized usage to
provide flexibility. The ratio in this case is few users to a
single machine. VMware, Xen source and Virtual Iron operate in this
space.
Client Consolidation Infrastructure (CCI) is yet another option. In
this case, the back-end will have blade PC architecture. When the
virtualized client connects to the back-end there is dynamic
allocation of resources and it gives one : one computing.
“CCI gives the best performance. VDI’s and CCI’s
cost of implementation would be around the same, and would make
sense for large enterprises,” said Rao.
At the hardware end there are two options—either virtualize
on the server blade or on the PC blade. PC blade virtualization is
easy to configure.
“PC blades can be redefined as the user requirement changes,
so you could assign four users per blade or 16 users per blade as
per your requirements,” said Dunford.
The advantages of PC blades include lower administrative,
operational and maintenance resource demands; space savings at the
workstation; ease of adding and relocating end users; reduction of
workstation noise caused by fans and hard drives, and work area
heat generation; sharing of certain accessories like
uninterruptible power supplies; and improved physical security by
placing critical hardware in a central, locked location.
Server blade virtualization has some limitations. One must take
into consideration the number of users who need to be supported by
the hardware. Also, it is important to look at the input/output
between the device and the network.
It is up to IT heads to decide on the number of desktops that need
to be moved to the virtualized environment and those that should to
be kept as fat clients. Industry experts opine that enterprises can
choose to virtualize 100 percent of their client devices, but for
clients that require local applications, fat clients would be
required.
The other side
For Intelenet’s Deshpande, the key point of contention
with vendors is Return on Investment (RoI). He also wants to know
how this technology is implemented in a captive versus non-captive
call center because a third-party BPO would have segregated IT
environments. Any implementation therefore needs to factor in the
RoI. “I don’t think desktop virtualization will be
applicable to all organizations as a plain vanilla solution,”
he said.
According to Gartner, desktop virtualization is not yet ready for
deployment. Except for having a common image of the OS, it has not
penetrated the industry.
“Licensing is a barrier to desktop virtualization. Microsoft
has not come up with a policy on this technology,” said
Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Research Analyst, Client Computing
Group, Gartner.
Windows Vista Enterprise edition allows users to have four
installations of Windows in virtual machines (VMs), and they can
also install and use Vista Business Edition in a VM.
“We are making changes that will enable enterprises to have
an effective desktop virtualization in place and will ensure that
their expected benefits pan out in production,” said Rishi
Srivastava, Director, Windows Client Business Group, Microsoft
India.
However, an analyst from the Burton Group noted that though
Microsoft's virtual hard disk (VHD) format is open, it disallows
other vendors from using it because if VHD runs on any another
platform the software major will not be able to control the
licensing of that application.
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Anwer Bagdadi, Senior
Vice-president& CTO,
CFC India Services
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Bagdadi hopes that such issues would be taken care of in a few
months time. But he feels that enterprises should focus more on the
standardization of storage and server consolidation processes
before they take a leap toward desktop virtualization.
“Storage and server consolidation would ease desktop
virtualization as you have already consolidated various servers for
applications, files, print, domain etc,” said Bagdadi.
The servers are surrounded by various security policies. Using this
policy IT can segregate users and provide access as per defined
policies. Similarly, storage consolidation would take away the risk
of failure of storage as there would already be an existing backup
provision in place.
“Customers need to tell vendors to carry a proof-of-concept
at the customers end and test all their applications,” said
Achar.
Beyond BPO
Other verticals like manufacturing and healthcare are also
waking up to the potential of desktop virtualization.
“We are closely watching this space and will take a decision
in the coming months,” said Sanjeev Kumar, Country Head, IT,
Philips Electronics India. He explained that load balancing on the
server, continuous data availability, and the speed at which
business applications can be delivered are the key factors that
need to be looked at before going in for an implementation.
“In the next two years there would be a lot of demand for
this technology. Expect a few modifications in the next eight
months from us as well as other vendors,” said Achar.