The Aliens Have Landed

For a number of reasons this article had to be called ‘The Aliens Have Landed;’ firstly because we are beginning to see the deployment of larger virtual desktop implementations and similar to the arrival of aliens, there is always a concern that this technology really will help. It is common in IT to develop technologies and not really understand the capabilities and limitations of them until there are sizable real deployments. That is a good thing because by exploring many technologies we arrive at more optimal solutions, but there is a big difference between examining technologies and inviting them into the business. Think of this as the difference between listening for alien communications through SETI and actually picking up the phone to speak to an alien race. You need to be really confident of the outcome. We are now reaching that point with desktop virtualization and broader adoption is underway but sometimes in ways that were not predicted.

The ultimate intention of desktop virtualization is to create a more manageable PC platform. To see how that works and in order to understand the prospects of this new technology becoming the standard way of delivering client computing in the future, we need to look in more detail at how it achieves this.  The basic problem with the PC is that while we have long been aware that the PC image consists of three basic types of information (operating system (OS), applications and user environment), we have not been able to manage the image in that way. The problem is that applications modify the OS and the user environment can change both applications and the OS. Consequently, the tools we currently use to manage PCs are limited in their effectiveness – they try to automate management of a target that can be significantly different from what was expected. Accordingly, most day to day management of PCs has to assume that the machine has a unique problem and be diagnosed as such. This is inefficient and leaves users with PCs that are frequently not delivering as good a service as one would wish.

Desktop virtualization comes into this space to solve these problems. There are many forms of desktop virtualization including hosted virtual desktops which are being rolled out now, application virtualization to deliver applications without impacting the underlying OS and user virtualization to deliver the user environment to personalize and configure the machine. Additionally, in the future, client virtualization will allow us to manage laptops far more effectively than can be done at the present. One of the standout characteristics of virtualization is its ability to keep things separate, effectively introducing a layer that isolates one from the other. Desktop virtualization allows IT to keep the three basic types of information apart and hence manage them in the most appropriate way. That means that the OS Image and applications can be maintained at the current patch level without affecting each other and that the user environment is kept separate and delivered onto the other two components. In many ways the user environment is the central pin that lets us modify and manage the other components while giving the users a familiar and productive user experience.