VDI is the Wrong Approach in this Economy

By Doug Dooley
published: Monday, April 13 2009

Real Savings with Virtual Desktops, Virtual Savings with VDI

The economy around the globe has suffered a significant decline resulting in a rippling effect that has touched nearly every industry and every size business. Several economic prognosticators and even the U.S. president have predicted that the recession could last well beyond 2009, but no one can guarantee when our economy will actually turn around. With so much uncertainty, businesses are making decisions to reduce spending and extend the life of existing IT equipment while keeping workforces as nimble and productive as possible. Gartner recently released their 2009 CIO Agenda report that had 1,526 CIO and IT Executives representing more than $138 billion in IT spending responding to their survey. The Gartner survey showed that the top three IT priorities for 2009 were:

1. Improving business process
2. Reducing costs
3. Improving workforce effectiveness

In Enterprise IT, virtualization projects are synonymous with all three of these top priorities. Virtualization is often credited with everything from faster provisioning of new applications and desktops to slashing data center costs with server consolidation to helping companies' with their green initiatives. Broadly speaking, "virtualization" refers to abstraction layers of physical computing resources.  However, let's narrow the focus down to two important areas: servers and desktops.  Today, server virtualization is well understood and is quickly moving into the mainstream.  Desktop virtualization is not well understood and unfortunately is too often confused with one particular approach called VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

Common Approaches to Desktop Virtualization

There are three main approaches to desktop virtualization:

1. Hosted Virtual Desktops (VMs running on virtualized servers accessed by thin-clients also known as VDI) - This approach is ideal for task workers in a shared workstation environment who do not have a need for user-installed applications, offline mobility, or personalized settings. An example might be a part time university administrator who shares his or her workstation with other co-workers. Another example could be a hospital where several nurses share login from various terminals to input patient records that have stringent regulator requirements for data access.

2. Client Virtual Machines (type 1 & type 2 hypervisors) - this approach is ideal for QA/developers for engineering, demos, and testing. Also, Enterprise employees who use Mac & Linux PCs often need to run a second operating system (i.e. Microsoft Windows) in order to gain access to key business applications.

3. Virtual Workspaces (OS/application containers) - this approach is ideal for knowledge workers, mobile professionals, full-time employees, temporary workers, contractors and almost any Enterprise user who requires offline mobility, personalization and full application performance (e.g. medical imaging, automated design, 3D graphics, video/voice intensive applications) from a Windows PC environment.

The reality is that desktop virtualization is much bigger than just VDI. Desktop virtualization separates the desktop software (an end user's applications, data, and settings) from the underlying PC platform which lowers management cost, increases security control, extends the life of existing PC hardware, and provides flexible deployment options.

VDI allows customers to leverage existing investments in server virtualization. However, the challenge for almost any potential customer in 2009 is that the capital cost to make VDI scalable beyond a small group of users is out of reach. VMware's own online ROI calculator estimates an upfront cost of $3.5M USD for 2500 users using all of their default assumptions. Gartner's cost assumptions are similarly high.

The old adage of "using the right tool for the right job" is critically important in 2009. All forms of desktop virtualization can provide TCO savings in the long-run, but the approach that has the most daunting upfront capital costs is VDI. While there are savings with VDI, the capital costs can negate those savings and, therefore, we believe VDI is not the right approach in 2009 if near-term cost savings is of highest importance.

Our recommendation is to focus on the other two desktop virtualization approaches for maximum cost savings.  Virtual workspaces and client virtual machine solutions are best known for their strengths in offline mobility and a complete end user desktop experience.  There are many new solution offerings that provide centralized management and policy control capabilities without the need of a large data center build-out. Some of these solutions can perform much more efficiently through client-side execution, which significantly drives down capital costs on server and data center infrastructure. 

In the case of client virtual machines, IT organizations can enable cost savings programs that allow users to leverage employee-owned laptops instead of corporate issued devices. In the case of virtual workspaces, there is no second operating system needed, which means no requirement for additional Windows licensing costs and licensing complexity. Unlike all other desktop virtualization approaches, virtual workspaces allow end user applications to operate with less than one percent of overhead running close to full performance, which is often critical to the success of many knowledge workers and mobile professionals. The efficiency of virtual workspaces also saves additional costs by helping IT to extend the life of their existing PC hardware.

If you are considering a move from a traditional desktop environment into a virtual desktop environment, here are some basic questions to answer:

1. What does a successful desktop virtualization deployment look like for both IT & the end users?
2. How will virtual desktops reduce management costs?
3. How will virtual desktops reduce capital costs?

There are tremendous cost savings that businesses can achieve through desktop virtualization. If near term cost savings on desktop computing with minimal upfront capital spending is one of your goals, then virtual desktops can be an answer; just make sure the approach you select delivers real savings and not virtual savings.

RingCube TCO report featuring Gartner research on the costs of Hosted Virtual Desktop, Ringcube