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If you ask one of the early adopters of virtualization technologies what prompted them to take what at that time seemed a radical step, it is quite likely that you will find reasons like resource utilization and better manageability at the top. It is not too difficult to understand why. The firstbetter resource utilizationwas a direct requirement from the bosses managing finance; IT was an isolated budget head and a clear cost center, so the more you got by spending, the smarter you were. The secondmanageabilitystemmed directly from what was (and still is) the top of mind challenge for the IT managers; complexity of managing is a problem that all IT managers grapple with most of the time.

Those two reasons also explain why the whole virtualization wave started with servers and storage. Servers and data centers were the "direct" operations areas of the centralized IT departments while the "humble" desktop was low-down on the IT challenge priority list. Not that everything was smooth and stable there. But then, they were "problems of the users" that helpdesks, more often than not outsourced, could tackle.

Things have changed. And they have changed drastically. A single factor has overshadowed everything elsethe growing concern for rising energy costs. So much so, that every single IT vendor worth its name has now a "green" initiative in place. Almost every large user of IT is far more worried about the overall cost of power (not to talk of the climate change concerns) consumed by IT than about the much-smaller-in-comparison cost of IT equipment.

And, when you consider that "Big Picture", the desktop has suddenly become the next hottest candidate for virtualization. Just consider this. An average PC utilizes about 120 watts per hour. In contrast, an ultra thin client device could consume as less as 400 milli-watts per hour. So, that is a saving of 119.6 watts per one machine. If an organization has 1,000 machines, it can save 119.6 kilowatts per hour. That is 86 MWs per month directly. And, we have not even talked about air-conditioning and other costs that go with it.

That itself is reason enough to embrace desktop virtualization.

Plethora of Benefits
It may be the top-of-the-mind issue of corporate big honchos, but by no means is energy efficiency the only driver of virtualization. Talk to IT guys, they have an entirely different set of reasons. And they are right.

Typically, in the traditional desktop environment, even simple troubleshooting in a PC requires an IT support staff to physically go to the machine if it cannot be sorted out by the user by following instructions on the phone. Most know the pain of waiting for that support to come in, which become totally unproductive time in many functions such as back-office processing.

Also, applications and patches have to be updated in these PCs one at a time. Though many organizations have partially automated it, allowing users to update the patches, lots of users still struggle and/or ignore these instructions.

That does not just reduce the efficiency of the individual PCs concerned, it could also affect the network especially when it is a security patch. Malicious email programs that attack a PC, which has not updated its security application, can easily spread to other parts of the network.

Also, with increased focus on data protectionand significant organizational data resides on distributed desktopsin newer regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, it becomes a Herculian task for the IT managers to ensure that all the individual desktops comply to the standards. Apart from intentional data theft, the possibility of crashes is also high and such crashes, when they happen, often can affect an entire group and not just an individual.

So, while like server and storage virtualization, desktop virtualization does economize IT resource, more practical reasons could be manageability and energy efficiency.

Desktop virtualization reduces desktop downtime as it allows centralized fixing of any problems, which results in better availability. The patches and upgrades are performed centrally at the data center, thus reducing vulnerability; data and applications sit in the data center proving data protection. Also, there is another major benefit. New users can be added almost in no time.

But talking of cost benefit, apart from lower IT costs and lower energy costs, desktop virtualization helps in cutting management cost and also the cost of downtime.

Understanding VDI
One of the fundamental challenges that confronts the enterprise CIO as well as the vendors is in arriving at a virtualization eco-system, wherein one is able to arrive at hardware as well as software virtualization. But it is easier said than done. The twin challenges here are one, centralizing apps in such a way that one can provision and give conditional access to users and at the same time create access points through thin terminals. Two, achieving control and agility through centralizationhere is where VDI has the potential to usher in defined changes. For starters, this centralized methodology will sound like terminal services through server virtualization, but the key difference in VDI is that it replicates the total desktop environment in a virtual manner custom specific to the user. In other words, it takes the physical desktop functionality and makes it virtual without stripping down the luxury of the individual desktop features which many of us are used to.

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