Virtual desktops: Are they almost here?

When national ISP iiNet was building its follow-the-sun contact centre, uppermost in IT manager Matthew Toohey's mind was managing its risk.

Toohey chose VMware's virtualisation technology for 200-400 new desktops because with offices from Auckland to Cape Town, the ISP could build a virtual call centre infrastructure far from its home in Perth on Australia's west coast.

The set-up dropped the cost of implementation and management, guaranteed disaster recovery and reduced risk by simplifying power redundancy.

Only a single instance of the desktop operating system needed to be stored, with only subtle differences between users subject to updating. The big win for iiNet is its virtual desktops are "fast and secure", he says.

Where the exercise became difficult was managing the Microsoft licences - a common stumbling block for those investing in virtual desktops.

"The single biggest issue I've had with virtual desktops is licences. The server side is bedded down - I know what my costs are with confidence but in terms of desktops ... I feel like I'm buying the same component twice," says Toohey.

In response iiNet has a fixed pool of devices for its call centre whose licences are locked down individually. He says the licence advice he gets from Microsoft varies: "Depending on who you talk to you get a different answer".

As Toohey's experience suggests, the first question anyone considering a virtualised desktop should ask themselves or their customer is about Microsoft licences.

To understand why licences are important we need to remember what the world was like before we had virtual machines - those pseudo-computers that look and act like real PCs but are stripped of the need to relate directly to the underlying hardware that powers them.

Microsoft's DOS and later Windows software emerged from an environment where the operating system and applications were tightly knit with the hardware (processors, memory and storage) that supplied them with their grunt. It seemed logical to make a software licence cover the actual hardware device under it.

But virtual machines change the rules because the "PC" exists in the ether, as a file or "image" on host hardware that is stored anywhere from a desktop to the data centre.

The image is no longer tied to the device but Microsoft's view is largely that this is still the case.

It's for this reason that IBRS analyst Kevin McIsaac recommends anyone considering such desktops gets top-notch legal advice at the start. He says the world views of Microsoft and virtualisation vendors are "incompatible".

"Resellers have to be very careful of Microsoft licensing because it has a lot of gotchas.

"[It] is all device based whereas the virtual desktop is really a server-centric view of the world. You might think you have 10 images so you need 10 licences; no, you need a licence for every device that can connect to that image.

"If you have 10,000 devices in your organisation and no way to control or audit those devices you may need 10,000 licences."

He says Microsoft doesn't litigate customers caught short, instead preferring to call in a software auditor for a chat with the potential infringer to come to a figure to make the problem go away.

That's usually a "very scary" number, he says.

Dr McIsaac recommends resellers do a software audit and implement controls before virtualising their customers' desktops; he recommends the AppSense tool for this.

And he warns resellers to stay within the bounds of any indemnities provided by their suppliers.

"If I was a reseller, whatever I was told by my supplier I would want indemnity - make it legal so that if someone does an audit and it comes to a couple million bucks and Microsoft comes to me [the reseller] I can go to my supplier."

Read on for more advice on virtual desktops...

Dr McIsaac cautions resellers not to be bound up in the hype around virtual desktops; IBRS research shows less than one percent of desktops are virtualised and that won't change swiftly.

"The key piece of advice I would give anyone in the channel is the market hype is very high on this product," Dr McIsaac says.

"What is often believed to be the case of high adoption, very successful, large-scale replacement of desktops is not accurate. Virtual desktops have a place but largely it's in very specific niche cases."

What may give virtual desktops a boot in the backside is customers' thirst to upgrade to Windows 7.

Such "forklift upgrades", where whole systems and standard operating environments are replaced are an excellent time to do the virtual desktop legwork, says Jocelyn Goldfein, vice president and general manager of the desktop business unit at virtualisation software maker, VMware.

"For someone upgrading to Windows 7 this is an excellent time because you have to think hardware [and] desktop applications," Goldfein says.

"Unusually, this is a situation where you can do them together.

"Once you are virtualised, it becomes very easy to delete old applications or add new applications and operating systems and it becomes very easy to roll back. Rather than roll out Windows XP one day and Windows 7 the next you can roll it out in a more organic approach.

"It makes it incremental rather than a massive revolution."

VMware Asia-Pacific product marketing manager David Wakeman says resellers offering hosted services should look at virtual offices created in minutes using wizard interfaces to cobble together such services as Exchange e-mail, servers and desktops.

Some big telecommunications companies and infrastructure providers such as Melbourne IT, Webcentral, IBM and Fujitsu are already moving this way.

"Long-term, the wave is to make it an externally hosted offering," Wakeman says. "The short-term opportunity is to take on managed desktops for the customer."

Sydney's Virtual.Offis has 40 resellers and its own corporate user customers providing such a service.         

Virtual.Offis founder Craig Allen says the company rents products from Microsoft for its customers
by the hour.

"A key driver we saw is this is a secure, easy and fast way for provisioning billable IT services," Allen says. "A lot of products don't allow you to do billing for that service.

"In the physical world someone may have Visio installed on a workstation and someone else wants to use that application so they have to physically use that workstation - but I can make that available to all [under a licence agreement with Microsoft]."

Allen says virtualised desktops suffer from Australia's tyranny of bandwidth; Australian ISPs are among the most expensive in the world for the purposes of virtualisation.

"We live in the dark ages here; there's only two countries in the world that charge for excess bandwidth and do throttling," Allen says. "The US has been 10-times more cost effective than here."

Financial organisations are especially attracted to virtual desktops. Allen says they benefit from a prudential point of view but IBRS' Dr McIsaac says it's mostly a cost-risk analysis.

"Security is amazing; trying to do compliance with workstations is next to impossible," Allen says. "Everyone has a USB port or CD-ROM burner and there's no way to track where that data goes, but with a virtual desktop solution I can lock it down completely."

Banks have used virtual desktops to provide environments to their offshore developers, Dr McIsaac says: "They have application development of code they consider to be quite valuable - they want to keep it onshore for control - it's a quick way to give a preconfigured desktop to someone in another country."

Allen says he started Virtual.Offis with the goal of a stateless device - no need for storage, memory or processor. US hardware developer, Pano Logic, is a startup providing something very close to that concept.

It has hardware and management software to help businesses virtualise their work forces. Pano Logic calls its paperweight-sized Pano Device a "zero client", configured through associated management software and a Windows wizard installer.

Pano Logic product vice president Mike Fodor says it has a niche in challenged environments and where privacy, identity and security management are paramount, such as hospitals, factories and hospitality.

"There's never any local data resident on the device," Fodor says. "For customers in healthcare, banking and education an appealing factor is there's no liability - if someone walked off with a Pano Device there's  no chance there's any sensitive patient information on there."

Pano Logic's Australian distributor Virtual Desktops Australia finds the devices ideal for environments that use Windows XP and need multimedia, says director Adam Lawton.

But the heaviness of the packets sent with Pano Logic's proprietary protocol count them out for use in a remote data centre, Lawton says.

"The product is limited to Windows XP; it's well suited to call centres, task workers where you have a common set of roles that a group of individuals perform in a LAN environment [but it's] not targeted at the data centre," Lawton says.

The CRN view

Virtual desktops shouldn't be sold on the basis of cost because the evidence is flimsy that there are savings over well-managed desktops. They should be sold on a case-by-case basis depending on the operational needs of the customer. For instance, customers concerned their data or intellectual property could fall into the wrong hands may be better suited to virtual desktops especially if their workers are more task oriented. Customers with virtualised servers are the low-hanging fruit for virtual desktops and may more readily accept virtual desktops for some of their workers.