Desktop Virtualization 101 Understanding Desktop Virtualization Delivery Models This slide deck was used as part of a conference session providing an introduction to desktop virtualization presented by Simon Bramfitt , founder of Entelechy Associates The session was held at the Virtualization Solutions Exchange (VSX 2012) November 2, 2012 at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. Information on VSX 2012 can be found here http://www.vsx2012.com/index.cfm Entelechy Associates and the EA logo are trademarks of Entelechy Associates llc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.   License - This document is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. You are free: to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work to Remix — to adapt the work Under the following conditions: Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. With the understanding that: Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Public Domain — Where the work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license. Other Rights — In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license: · Your fair dealing or fair use rights, or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations; · The author's moral rights; · Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights. Notice — For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Entelechy Associates 2012

@SimonBramfitt Introductions Simon Bramfitt is the founder and principal analyst of Entelechy Associates. Simon blogs here http://blog.simonbramfitt.com/ Entelechy Associates is a California-based industry analyst organization with a particular focus on desktop management and application delivery technologies, we provide strategic guidance to both technology vendors and enterprise IT organizations looking to provide and implement next-generation application delivery services. Further information on Entelechy Associates can be found here http://entelechy-associates.com/

Don Estridge – President, IBM Entry Systems Division Don Estridge President of the IBM Entry Systems Division and “Father of the PC”

The IBM 5150 Personal Computer was launched on August 12, 1981 The IBM 5150 Personal Computer was launched on August 12, 1981. At the time, the project team shocked IBM executives by forecasting that it would sell 250,000 units in three years. Just four years later IBM announced that it had sold 1 million PCs worldwide. In the last 30 years, over 3 billion PCs, and PC descendants have been sold.

Much has changed since the launch of the PC Much has changed since the launch of the PC. User interfaces evolve beyond all recognition from the blocky green on black text of the DOS command prompt to the rich graphical interfaces driven by a mouse touch and voice that are used today. At the same time, computers are faster, smaller, and cheaper than ever before; with even the cheapest mobile phone having many times the computing power of the original 5150. Computers have got faster and cheaper in the intervening period, but personal computing has not got, in any meaningful sense, better. Today’s personal computing experience is still centered on the device. With few exceptions, applications and are still installed locally. The only way to ensure that applications are available as needed is to rigorously enforce standardization and ensure that all devices have required all applications preinstalled. That has to change

“What we discovered was that the way people responded emotionally to PCs was more important than what the computer actually did. Setting aside the sales success of the PC, Estridge recognized something far more important than the overall market opportunity. “What we discovered was the way people responded emotionally to PCs was more important than what the computer actually did” A profound understanding that would take the best part of 30 years to be proven right.

Few people had the insight to realize the importance of Estridge’s revelation

When first introduced, the iPhone and iPad were unashamedly positioned as a consumer devices, expensive toys and no more than that. However, the outstanding utility that the combination of cloud services and high-performance tablets created, rapidly forged the transition from play thing to business tool. New market segments were created overnight, forcing established enterprise systems vendors to react if they wish to remain relevant. Opening the door to a new generation of enterprise class services. It was only when real business value could be attached to consumer centric devices like the iPad that the problems started to surface. The iPad educated a new generation of employees to the opportunities inherent in of consumer centric devices.

The collective voice of business is demanding change

Virtualization IT’s response was built on virtualization

Virtualization Or if you prefer, virtualization

Server Virtualization Application OS Hardware Virtualization arrived in the data center Transforming inefficient physical servers

Server Virtualization App App App OS OS OS Hypervisor Hardware Into more versatile platforms capable of running multiple independent workloads

Server Virtualization App App App OS OS OS Hypervisor Hardware More importantly there workloads could be managed as a tightly integrated package of OS and Application providing provisioning flexibility and consistency

Right? What’s good for the Data Center Must be good for the Desktop Stands to reason then that if we can do it with big server workloads we should be able to do it with the desktop

Desktop Virtualization Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Desktop Virtualization Hypervisor Hardware So we built VDI environments

And they didn’t work

Sometimes spectacularly.

What is Desktop Virtualization? The creation of personalized working environments, the applications, data and configuration settings that each user needs to do their job while at the same time ensuring conformance with organizational governance, risk and compliance management policies. The core problem is that while the principle of server virtualization to concentrate multiple OS/Application stacks on a hypervisor works very well, desktop virtualization has very little to with hypervisors. Desktop virtualization is better thought of as a management system

Lesson Zero The creation of personalized working environments, the applications, data and configuration settings that each user needs to do their job while at the same time ensuring conformance with organizational governance, risk and compliance management policies. Consider this lesson #0 Creation - Dynamic, real time, flexible Personalized - yours, your apps, your data, your config Their job and nothing but your job – rights management – eliminate Admin privileges Policy controls – pwd mgmt, data information leakage

Desktop Virtualization Desktop virtualization is the future of personal computing Lesson #1

VDI? VDI is just one type of desktop virtualization

VDI? Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Apps OS User Hypervisor We host multiple desktop OS instances on a hypervisor, but the real work is in managing the applications Hardware

VDI- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Server Hosted Desktop Virtualization (Gartner Inc.) Citrix XenDesktop, VDI-in-a-Box VMware View Dell vWorkspace Microsoft and others …

VDI Desktop Operating System (Windows) Remoting Protocol – Connected Operation Only End Point PC Thin Client Mobile Devices

Moar IOPS! VDI Lesson #2 More IOPS Why are IOPS so important? Desktop operating systems like Microsoft Windows are designed to run with dedicated system resources – most importantly memory and storage. Ensuring adequate resources are available on a standalone desktop PC is never a challenge. A PC can readily accommodate 16 GB of memory and conventional low-cost (7,500 RPM) spinning disk storage can offer in excess of 1 TB and 80 IOPS per spindle, which is more than adequate for Windows 7. In a VDI environment, where many desktops are concentrated onto a single hypervisor platform, meeting these requirements becomes more difficult. Storage capacity is never a problem, compared to many systems, the amount of disk storage required for a VDI environment is low. Attaining the required throughput is, however, a different matter. With many hundreds, and in some cases many thousands, of desktops all sharing a common storage infrastructure, demand for IOPS presents a significant challenge. Furthermore, as a desktop operating system, Windows 7 was developed with the assumption that all operating system resources are available for its exclusive use. With VDI, many Windows desktops simultaneously and independently read and write to a shared set of storage resources in a manner that looks highly random since there is no coordination among the desktops. Random reads and writes present an interesting performance challenge for latency sensitive disk-based storage infrastructure.   The impact of this problem is most dramatically demonstrated in the “boot storm”. The Windows boot and logon processes generate many times more IOPS than steady-state user operations. When many desktops are all starting at once, for example at the start of a call center shift, the storage infrastructure will see an order of magnitude increase in load compared to the rest of the day. In poorly specified systems, this boot storm will overload the storage infrastructure, starving Windows desktops of resources, resulting in excessively long startup times and degrading performance across all active systems. Conventional storage solutions attempt to meet the IOPS challenge by scaling out – deploying many more high-performance disk drives than are needed for capacity purposes to deliver the required IOPS. This approach is capital intensive, represents a significant ongoing operational cost and is ultimately unsustainable as virtual desktop numbers increase. Scale-up solutions make use of Solid State Drive (SSD) storage systems which achieve much greater IOPS to meet boot storm load levels. However, SSDs have relatively low capacity and are expensive in comparison to conventional drives. Server based high-performance flash memory controllers can be used in conjunction with disk-based SANs to increase available IOPS, but these often cannot be used with blade servers which are frequently cited as the preferred hardware platform for VDI environments.

IOPS v Login Time Without enough IOPS boot and login time can extend from seconds to many minutes

VDI Compute/Storage Costs However over the past few years vendors have worked hard to lower the cost of compute and storage to the point where today we can honestly say that VDI ‘can’ cost less than a conventional PC

VDI Challenges Discovery Integration Managing Change User Experience Service Level Management VDI may now be cheap, but that does not mean it is easy Transforming existing desktop services delivery teams can be difficullt

What about RDSH? RDSH - Remote Desktop Services Host AKA – Citrix, Terminal Services, Service based Computing

User User User User User User User User User User User Apps Apps Apps Windows Server 2008/2012 Hypervisor One OS, but many independent sessions Many configuration options, delivering individual apps or a full desktop Hardware

RDSH Easier licensing Lower cost licensing More sessions per server Application-centric model is mobile friendly More mature No IOPS concerns Many advantages

VDI Desktop OS Greatest application compatibility Simplest application support Possibly more stable But do not overlook the fact that VDI offers benefits that RDSH cannot deliver

RDSH There’s life in the old dog yet Lesson 3 RDSH will be a (the) major part of VDI for the foreseeable future

DaaS? What about DaaS

DaaS Desktop as a Service VDI from the Cloud (Public/Private/Hybrid) Remoting Protocol – Connected Operation Only End Point PC Thin Client Mobile Devices DaaS = Cloud hosted VDI

DaaS IBM, Fujitsu, Dell, CompuCom, RapidScale, tuCloud, dinCloud, … Desktone, Virtual Bridges, Citrix, View … Focus tends to be on service provide rather than technology But technology is still important Desktone and Virtual Bridges started as pure DaaS players but are finding an increasing market for on premise deployments (i.e., VDI)

DaaS A sinmple model

RDSH for DaaS Service Provider License Agreement Available More flexible service Lower cost Microsoft licensing is biased against DaaS - but the older RDHS technology has a licensing model that is far more DaaS friendly and substantially cheaper

DaaS Display Data Pay close attention to the impact that latency can have on application performance in DaaS environments

DaaS Challenges Diversity of provider and platform Provider stability Application performance User experience DaaS decision making is harder due to diversity of provider and platform and possible application performance issues But for some use cases it has significant advantage

DaaS Could have potential

IDV?

IDV Intelligent Desktop Virtualization (Marketing Gone Wild) VMware Workstation, Fusion, Mirage Citrix XenClient MokaFive BareMetal Put simple IDV runs a VDI style desktop on the endpoint rather than the data center -

IDV Centrally managed Local execution End Point Local compute, storage, graphics Disconnected Operation End Point PC only (today) No tablet, smartphone options today

User Apps OS Hypervisor Hardware As with VDI - IDV runs on a hypervisor And can run more than one managed desktop image per device

User Apps OS Hypervisor Hardware However in many cases IDV runs just a single managed OS image

User Apps OS Hardware Hypervisor IDV can work with both type I and type II hypervisors,

User Apps OS Hypervisor Hardware And using the Mirage technology that VMware acquired with its Wanova acquisition The hypervisor can be dispensed with as well

IDV Challenges Not for mobile devices Low awareness Low adoption Low prioritization IDV is today limited to x86 devices

IDV If mobile is not a big part of your business consider this carefully

Thank you