Making Desktop Virtualization Work

By VSM News Staff
published: Friday, April 11 2008

  The following is an interview with Raj Dhingra, Group Vice President of the Desktop Delivery Group at Citrix.

RD: Citrix has taken a leadership position in transforming the data center into a delivery center. What that means is we believe in three key things: Applications need to be delivered by IT, servers or data centers need to be dynamic, not static, and desktops should be delivered. So, desktop virtualization technology enables Citrix to deliver desktops as a service.

RD: Citrix XenDesktop is one of the key product lines that is included in the Citrix Delivery Center. With the other components of the Delivery Center, XenServer and XenApp, Citrix effectively has the ability to provide an end–to-end virtualization solution including server, application and desktop virtualization. XenDesktop provides three key benefits: it accelerates the delivery of desktops to knowledge workers, it enables stronger data protection and control, and finally it reduces the cost of ownership of desktops by up to 40%.

RD: : There are several alternatives available in the market today for desktop computing. How Citrix offers an approach that is quite unique. We call this approach “desktop delivery,” and it is a solution that delivers desktops on demand.

With desktop virtualization what IT is essentially doing is centralizing the management and control of desktops. While centralization makes it easier to secure data and control desktop access we don’t believe it is a complete solution since it does not solve fundamental issues related to desktop lifecycle management. This includes things like image provisioning, monitoring and updates. In addition we’ve also heard from early adopters of desktop virtualization that virtualization alone introduces new challenges, like a degraded end user experience, a lack of mature image lifecycle tools and very high storage requirements and costs in the data center.

Citrix has an approach to desktops that uses fundamentally different principles than other companies. Citrix’s first principle is separating the applications and desktop for a more low cost, flexible and on demand delivery infrastructure. What this means is that when a desktop is delivered to the user it actually is assembled on demand by taking the OS, applications and profile, and delivering a unique and virtual desktop. The second principle for us in desktop delivery is ensuring a superior user experience to make sure that we can accelerate the adoption and expand the use cases across the office and knowledge workers. A third key principle for desktop delivery is the ability to accelerate the provisioning management and delivery of desktops with next generation lifecycle management technologies. The fourth key principle for desktop delivery is providing an open architecture with broad ecosystem support, which means that desktop delivery can be enabled by using any hypervisor. It means that we can work with a broad range of end points including PCs, desktop appliances, and other data center and software infrastructure technologies that reside in the data center.

RD: As IT starts centralizing user desktops, they start to move the operating system, the applications and the user’s data into the data center on various infrastructures, servers as well as storage. If the desktop virtualization technology requires a separate image of the operating system and a separate image of the applications for every single user, than effectively what you’re doing is bringing all that storage that resides on the individual desktop PC or laptop into the data center. You can imagine that if there are five thousand user desktops now being brought into a data center, effectively you’ll have to store those five thousand images on a storage area network, which is significantly more expensive than that hard drive that’s in your desktop. Because of this, most IT will not centralize desktops if they need to effectively replicate the images that reside on the various desktops out there.

Critical technology that is required and that Citrix provides is the ability to provision a desktop working off a single image. The value and the promise for IT administrators is to be able to provision desktops using a single image of the OS that can be quickly provisioned, easily maintained and updated, then delivered with the specific application and the specific profile for that user.

So with XenDesktop our provisioning technology really enables the simple management provisioning and real time delivery of an on demand desktop. Since XenDesktop is working off a single image effectively all you’re storing is a golden master of the operating system that the end user requires and you’re not being asked or required to store five thousand copies of the same image. There is a fundamental difference in the approach XenDesktop takes in the dramatic reduction of the storage area requirements compared to the other technologies or solutions that require replication of these images in the data center, making adoption a significant barrier for IT.

RD: That is certainly a question that is being faced by many customers and our experience in working with several of the Fortune 500 customers in the last 18 months has been that desktop virtualization is being looked at by customers across multiple industries. They could be in financial services, healthcare; we’ve also talked to customers in manufacturing, retail, government and education.

There are many reasons why these customers are evaluating a solution like XenDesktop for desktop virtualization. They are looking for better control, protection and security of their data. Certainly for regulated industries, whether it’s financial or healthcare, they are concerned about data security and compliance. By centralizing the desktops multiple benefits are gained around data protection, data security and data control. That is one use case we’ve seen that’s particularly popular.

Whether it’s for refreshing or replenishing existing desktops or rolling out new desktops to branch offices or new users, companies are evaluating desktops for those key reasons. In a recent survey of fifty CIOs by Credit Suisse there was a fairly dramatic trend of opinion that traditional PCs would be declining as your standard way of delivering or using a desktop. Today about 85% of the user population consists of traditional PC users -- in about 5 years it will reduce to 51%. Virtual desktops are growing from less than 5% now, to certainly more than 15% in the next five years.

RD: : We are announcing XenDesktop today. The general availability of XenDesktop will be at the Citrix Synergy event in Houston, Texas on May 20, 2008. In the mean time, the beta version of XenDesktop is available at www.citrix.com/xendesktop. So anyone interested in evaluating XenDesktop prior to its general availability in May are welcome to download the beta.

RD: The Citrix XenDesktop is available in multiple editions including the standard edition, enterprise, and a platinum edition. The suggested retail value for the standard edition starts at $75 per concurrent user. Further pricing for all editions and details are available at www.citrix.com/xendesktop..

RD: In two words, I think the future of virtualization is “very bright.” We’ve also heard from many CIOs and IT people that virtualization will be everywhere. What does that really mean? Enterprises have seen the value of implementing application virtualization and Citrix has delivered that for more that a decade. In the last three to five years customers have seen the benefits of adopting server virtualization, and seeing the administrative, and operational savings that you can get from server virtualization while delivering a better service and value to users, to their business users and to their developers. In a similar way desktop virtualization has the ability to provide dramatic reductions in the lifecycle management in desktops while improving significantly the ability to deliver desktops on demand. Setting up a desktop might have taken days or weeks in the past -- now a new desktop will be delivered and provisioned in minutes or seconds in the future with a desktop delivery solution.

If you combine these different types of trends together, virtualization -- whether it’s server, desktop or application – really provides the ability to transform how information technology gets delivered to users. A great analogy is if you think about your television programming or your video programming and how in the past, you had to wait for a certain program to come to you. The service providers have now effectively created the ability to deliver content on demand. And it doesn’t matter what your access device is -- it could be a 13” TV, it could be your cell phone, it could be your 50” high definition TV. The content adapts itself but most importantly you as a user have a flexibility to use any access device to get the content on demand. I think the future of virtualization will reflect the user’s ability to access any application and interact with any environment that they choose to interact with to be able to get work done.

RD: Readers can go to www.citrix.com, or for more XenDesktop specific information you can visit us at www.citrix.com/xendesktop. The website has a bunch of very useful tools and white papers that describe our unique approach to desktop delivery. Included is also information about what may be some of the key requirement that users should be looking at to evaluate purchasing a desktop virtualization solution.

Related Links:

Citrix.com , Xen Desktop , Citrix Delivery Center , XenApp , XenServer