Virtual desktops thrive in the cloud

What the leader is doing

VMware is pursuing three strategies. The first is desktop virtualisation in vSphere, it’s cloud platform. Wakeman says this year it has seen installations rise to sales of seats in the thousands, such as the recent IBM win with 5000 seats on VMware View at the Department of Health and Ageing. Education is also an aggressive adopter.

The second is an early release of Project Horizon, a cloud service that delivers software as a service and Windows applications due for wide release later this year. VMware will make it off-premises so partners can build solutions around it.

The third is VMware’s expanding armoury of bought applications, including productivity suite Zimbra, presentation maker SlideRocket and social networking platform SocialCast.

“I’m yet to hear a customer who says the future for me is to put everything I have today in a locked stack on the desktop with Microsoft into another vendor’s locked stack in the cloud,” Wakeman says. Instead customers are probably going to consume “bits and pieces of everything and use VMware to get there”.

“That tends to be the message that we hear from customers and I’m sure partners are hearing the same thing.”

IBM has just released its own virtual desktop software package that has infrastructure software required “up to the gold master”, says its sales executive Nick Day. That makes it much easier to integrate components from vendors.

For remote offices or mobile workers the gold master standard operating environment is installed on the local hard drive to synch with the data centre when connected to the network.

The package white-labelled by Gartner “cool vendor”, Virtual Bridges has disaster recovery, troubleshooting, an operating system and management console for the desktops and the server.

“Our partners and customers download a couple of files from our central website, and they basically have a virtual desktop up and running in two hours,” IBM's Day says. “It’s really about simplicity and speed.” It is $215 plus GST a user a year; there is no server licence.

Day says partners are selling it to customers to deploy on their servers or with hardware. Some partners are looking at a hosted or cloud model. He says deployments of the software released in April will be up in three months and he predicts that in-house installations will be most popular with resellers managing their clients’ networks using the browser console.

And the third wave will be generic, virtual desktop services supplied on demand by partners but IBM must update its software to support multi-tenanted instances before that happens. Multi-tenancy should arrive before the end of the year and support for zero clients is planned. The package uses the KVM hypervisor that requires to be installed on bare metal. A reseller could run an instance with customers or an implementation a server for each customer.

“Our solution would require those to be run on physically separate servers today. We can’t run a hypervisor in a hypervisor,” Day says.