Business Continuity in a Virtual World

By Paul Ghostine
published: Friday, November 21 2008

Desktop Virtualization Fosters Improved Business Continuity

Enterprises spend lots of time and money making sure that the data center is protected, and that there are mechanisms in place to safeguard information assets and ensure business continuity in the event of disaster.  Much less attention is focused on the recoverability of the computing environments of each worker: the PCs, laptops and mobile devices which we use to help with our work and access mission critical applications.

Desktop virtualization offers a range of benefits when it comes to desktop management and business continuity.  The article explores the problem of safeguarding workers' computing environments, explains how desktop virtualization works, and describes how the technology can aid disaster recovery efforts.  Recent advances in technology are driving increased adoption and benefits for enterprises and users alike.

No Desktop is an Island

Personal computers are like the kudzu of the enterprise: they multiply like weeds.  And, users are like - well, users.  Despite the best procedures for ensuring a locked down corporate computing environment from the data center to the PC, users constantly find new and innovative ways to confound IT administrators.  They visit websites, click on attachments, and try to load new programs.

When pressed, most in IT - at least, those working in large organizations and enterprises - would likely point to a variety of procedures, such as nightly backups of key data from each person's computer over the network.  They would discuss elaborate desktop management processes, help desk support and point to software that helps them restore data when lost.

The best laid plans do not account for the importance of the local computing experience.  The personal computing device is how people organize and do their work, whether using personal productivity Office-type applications or mission critical enterprise software.  Users accessorize these workday centerpieces with personalized features to ensure a familiar and user friendly environment.

Looking from the top down, the typical data center is generally protected by a Rube Goldberg-like collection of redundant servers and storage, automatic failover, remote mirroring / replication and automated backups.  The schemes vary depending on the need for availability and the user base; e.g. popular ecommerce sites and banks that provide online account access have more sophisticated ways to protect against and recover from disruption than other businesses.

Regardless of the specific uptime needs, recovering from a disaster involving centralized data and applications is containable and relatively straightforward, even if the task involves many moving parts.

Now, let's look at the challenge from a distributed computing perspective.  The job of securing PCs is much more difficult, especially for dispersed work forces, mobile workers and remote facilities.  Further, there are more types of situations short of full blown disasters at the headquarters location that can interfere with a users' computing work.

For example, what happens when a user spills coffee on his or her laptop keyboard?  Or the soldier loses the laptop loaded with intelligence data?  Or a branch office gets flooded or has a fire?

Although it may be possible in all of these cases to get back the data and applications, and get user(s) up and running again, this may take some time and doing.  The time delay costs organizations in terms of lost productivity and lost business.

A range of solutions have evolved to help IT administrators manage IT computing resources, deal with the proliferation of various types of mobile and personal computing devices and better manage distributed computing environments.

In particular, virtualization - which started in the data center and is migrating to the desktop - provides important disaster recovery capabilities by isolating the applications and data from the end point devices.   Desktop virtualization extends the benefits of virtualization in the data center to the desktop, enabling organizations to get the reliability, data protection and disaster recovery features that have traditionally been available only for the data center.

Central Desktop Management Basics

There are a variety of technologies that enable central desktop management.  These include shared desktop systems, dedicated virtual blade servers, and virtual clients.  Each decouples applications and data from end point devices.  In doing so, they allow for centralized data storage of and hence easier backup and recovery.  There are benefits and tradeoffs for each type of technology.

Shared desktop systems employing the Microsoft Terminal Services platform allow multiple users to access a desktop operating system remotely, over the WAN, VPN or Internet.  Users run applications and access data stored on the central server in a window on their local PC.  Although it looks, and in many ways, behaves like the application is running locally, users may not get the same personalized workspace that they would otherwise have. The bigger challenge however is that most corporate applications are designed to run on desktop operating systems not a shared server operating system, leaving IT administrators with a web of challenges from application compatibility to application conflicts due to the lack of session isolation.

With dedicated virtual blade PCs each user can access a personalized desktop environment and run applications remotely by connecting with their own blade PC that is stored in a rack at the data center.  Users experience better quality with this option, and get the benefits of a personalized desktop environment.  It works best for power users that need dedicated resources.  The tradeoff is that organizations do not gain the efficiencies, cost and power savings that they would get by pooling and sharing computing resources.

With desktop virtualization, or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), administrators and users get much more flexibility.  The organization gains by storing desktop data and applications centrally, as virtual machines in the data center.  This enables easy recovery if a user's system becomes unavailable.  It gives users a full PC desktop experience.  Users may be allowed to install and run their own applications.  Their local keyboard and mouse function like a remote control.  Moreover, they can use any device, regardless of how it is configured to access their applications and desktop.