We call them the Laws of Physics vs. the "Suggestions of Physics" for good reason. 

>>Laws are proven, tested, validated, peer reviewed, challenged, and then accepted as fact after innumerable and honest evidence proves them to be so. We can bank on them.

>>Suggestions are fingers crossed, white knuckled, my promotion hangs on this, Murphy's Law riddled, probably rumor and vendor stained, and oft wrong snippets of information the cost of recovery from such usually outweighs the original benefit we sought by employing them.

The Speed of Light is a LAW

186,000 miles per second.

That's all you get. 

No particle can move faster

Everything has to occur within this limit (oh, and that is in a vacuum) 

-please also see maxwells theory of electromagnetism - it counts too

So who cares? [or why should you]

Well, lets think about this for a second.  Today, the market is running around, sleeves rolled up, getting really serious about virtual desktop [ insert VDI here ]. I dig this, both selfishly and as a technologist and as a heathen for anything new and different. And while everyone is evaluating technologies, solutions, vendors, configurations, use cases, costs, budgets, productivity gains, clouds and other whimsical things - these Laws of Physics effect everything, always, without failure.

Because i have to go mow the lawn in an hour, i will not ramble on into the "everything, and always" comments below...but i will pick on a few.

Use Cases: - The Protocol Incident

This is the first, and most talked about victim of the Speed of Light (or, the transmission of massless particles). Your distance away from the data source, and the latency effects of this distance, and other "hops" along the way can and should bring you in, or push you out of scope for VDI. Then and only then, should you begin to figure out which protocol is best for your use case. This has much more to do what you do inside that workspace, what apps you use, what kind kind of graphics you generate, what type of density you are aiming for (yes, some protocols use more CPU than others in rendering), what kind of pipe you have available, etc etc. Silicon is faster than software and the laws of physics tell us that a GPU 4 inches away from your screen will be faster and better than one in new york, if you are in texas. Its a law, deal with it ;)

Ahhh....the client hypervisor, type one or two - dealers choice. Things local. BYOPC. Helper VM's.VDI Management with local performance - 100,000,000 laptops just woke up because they are now fully in scope. And should be. In fact in the above assessment of YOUR users, create a new column next to CALL CENTER WORKERS called VDI-mobile. The commercial use of client hypervisors is here, and should be.

The good news is all of this is observable.  What do your users have and do today?  There is your answer for what you need next.

Configurations: - Moores Law and when good particles do bad things

This is one i get asked all the time. "How many virtual desktops per core? How many Virtual Disks per LUN? How much memory sharing? Which Hypervisors? Whats on your iPod [ok, some of you are still reading]"

Answer: It depends.

It is a fairy-tale to think that your users will do something magically different when you put them into VDI. They will do, exactly what they do today, and maybe even more of it. 

So, watch them. What do they do? What do they consume? What apps, cpu, memory, i/o, graphics, network, and other unpredictable and volatile things are they up to? Now, picture all of that on more expensive things, aggregated in your data center. 

There are limits. 

There are limits to how many things a cpu can handle, and what average memory access time (AMAT) plays on the performance of a system and applications, and how many random reads and writes you can make to a disk system at an instant in time, and there are mechanical seek time penalties, etc etc etc. Lots of stuff huh? 

Well, the good news is we can observe all of this, plan for it, make smart vendor choices. CONTINUE to watch it, and tune, tweak as needed, being mindful that users will always be Volatile, Unpredictable, and Abusive. This is another Law.

Vendor Choice: - Who buys you a better lunch-n-learn?

Ok, this is a bit dangerous, but to be honest - some vendors are better than others  (gasp)

Some will look you in the eye, and tell you how their products and solutions can help you, and others look you in the eye and tell you why their competitors stuff can't.  There is not much more you need to know on this fact.  Just make sure you have the data, measurements, and limits of physics and profile of user activity in your real world and challenge your vendor to explain to you how their gear can better handle your realities of physics.

Budget: - If i only had a dollar for ...

See above. You typically get what you pay for. And typically, we all buy too much. The power of virtualization is that we are supposed to deliver resources just in time, just enough, ebb and flow resource needs to availability, a magical self healing low admin touch utopia kind of like the Matrix mixed with crayola crayons. I have YET to see this, but hold out hope we get there some day. 

Budget will be determined by use cases, configuration, density, and your individual business needs, and user behavior. 

Please refrain from the tap-out "I can buy a $499 pc argument". We all know you can. And in looking at CAPEX (capital costs) of VDI - i find that kind of analysis akin to running the numbers of building your own personal powerplant to the cost on an electricity bill. If i had a dollar for every time i have been in the CAPEX argument, i would have like $7309 ( 4 times per day, every day, for 5 years - an estimate) Heck, i am not even sure if VDI is about OPEX anymore.

Really.

Do you think of desktops as NOUNS you have to BUY and Maintain, or VERBS you pay to DO ?  Times change.

User Experience: The new Math and Physics of VDI

My opinion, and i am not shy about this, is that VDI is about gains in productivity. If you get them, DO VDI, if you do not DO NOT DO VDI. When we watch the impact to our companies of a $100,000 user becoming 5% more productive because we invoke a new technology, we can calculate the gain, and this gain, is a much a law of economics as the laws of physics that enabled it.

So, User Experience = Productivity.

Productivity is the metric, the new math, to use to determine if VDI is appropriate [ insert hvd, client hypervisors, app-virt, and cloud here ]. CAPEX is dead. OPEX helps in powerpoint to executives, but if you really want to WOW them, throw up a productivity or USER YIELD slide. (explain to them why we moved away from typewriters to pc's in the first place)

The cool thing is we can observe this too. We may also now have the power to proactively and preemptively tweak our configurations to insure optimal user experience, maximum productivity. 

What your users have today, what your users do today, will determine what (if anything) you need tomorrow to increase productivity. There are vendors very willing to help you spend your budgets. 

BUT, before you do this, know how the laws of physics effect the realities of your environment. Your users behavior will determine use cases, those will determine configurations, those will determine density and vendor choices, which will touch budget, and getting what you pay for you may, just may, be able to boost productivity. 

Time to go mow the lawn.

All great experiments are worthless without observation. 

T.Rex

June 2010

 “I have NOT seen the light, clouds got in the way”

So what the heck does a blog title like that mean?  Well to be honest, for the better part of two years –

harkening back to Paul Moritz’s keynote at VMworld 2008 in Vegas – I have been delivering the line

“Cloud computing to me is a lot like unicorns – I believe in them, but have never seen one, so, I

reserve the right to be a bit skeptical.”

Well. I have seen the Unicorn, a few in fact, gathering in small herds, poking their heads out of the forest,

quiet, but there none the less.

So I flip back through my notebook to roughly 2003 and take a look as the commercial inception, adoption,

success, and failures of server virtualization…then flip forward a bit to about 2007 and beginning of 2008 to

the first real chatter surrounding VDI – and there…right there is the light, the Unicorn. One size can and

should fit all – spot architecting for 600,000,000 desktops (in my world) will take an uncommon amount of time,

energy, and effort – and in fact it only marginally better than what we used to do – putting every resource

IN THE BOX.  So VDI takes it out of the box, and we are seeing trends towards, not only take it out of the box,

take it all apart…but, then kind of glue it back together…..close.

Call it Cloud, Grid, IaaS, DaaS (basically anything with two capitals and “aa” in middle and you have it. The

model that will emerge as the sustainable, 20 year end state, for the myriad of technologies we are all working

to cobble together today – customer by customer-project by project-budget by budget.  This model will not work.

It will fail.  Now, there may be emergent standards that arise, winners, loosers, high flyers, also-rans, me-too’s

and other technologies that lock onto the cloud bandwagon – however the underlying reason they will do so

will not be to leverage marketing buzz, it will be for survival.  It will be because it is the right thing to do. It will be

because it works. Vendors and customers alike will benefit – although those not adroit enough to adapt will

perish on both fronts.  Technology came to us all as a competitive advantage – and over 20 years became the

single largest burden on corporate budgets. Ouch.

Today I heard a presentation from a business partner we are going to be working with here at Liquidware Labs 

[we are contributing some data stream monitoring, etc)- a cloud play so pure – I had to actually architect sufficient

vocabulary on the fly to explain my question in the context of their offering, and it hit me, square between the eyes.

There is no reason for a company to ever exclude cloud services of infrastructure, applications, storage, recover,

security, monitoring, desktop, directory services, storage, etc, etc from their business strategy.

Technically we have evolved to the point of ESCAPE VELOCITY. Virtualization, abstraction, memory, density and

networks are fully ready to shoulder the burden that these new services will offer. Business will have increased

uptime, agility, security, compliance, radically reduced if non-present capital exposure, premiums and discounts for SLA’s.

From the desktop to the data center why would you ever buy more than you need….at this moment?   If we can monitor,

monetize, and deliver any computer science metric, in real time, all the time, with interoperability sufficient to migrate

the task from your cloud to mine, and back again – and yes, at a profit or at a net savings – the illusion truly is that there

is something better to be doing.  I am unsure if the private, corporate Data Center (cloud) has much use looking out over

the next few years. Big clouds gobble up small ones.

Now, we call them the “laws of physics” and not the “suggestions of physics” for good reason. There are some

examples I can think of where quantum leaps in tech are still needed for Cloud Dominance…but I tell ya what…the internet

and caching has taught us an awful lot about how to get stuff where it needs to be as, or right before, people need them.

XaaS wins. Clouds, win. The unicorn is real.

As always, brutal feedback and discourse welcome.

T.Rex

May 2010

 I remembered this over the weekend....and thought of its implications in our current VDI "state" - perfecting my re-purposing of other peoples creative analysis on markets, and why we do what we do...

In economics, Reilly's law of retail gravitation states that larger cities will have larger spheres of influence than smaller ones, meaning people travel further to reach a larger city.

The law presumes the geography of the area is flat without any rivers, roads or mountains to alter a consumer's decision of where to travel to buy goods. It also assumes consumers are indifferent between the actual cities. (ahh, this get tricky)

The law was developed by William J. Reilly in 1931.

A plain English paraphrase would be that the balance or Break Point (BP) is equal to the Distance (d) between two places, divided by the following: Unity or Total (1) plus the Square Root of, the size of Place One (p1) divided by the size of Place Two (p2).d is distance and p1 and p2 are the sizes of the places between which the distance exists; the answer will give the distance from p2, also called a break-point. What is the break-point?

As an example: after leaving a store a you remember something that you wanted to buy; it just so happens that you are headed towards an alternative store b. The break-point can be thought of as the point after which you would travel towards store b instead of store a because of its notional "gravity". This would happen sooner, for example, if store b is an equivalent store but with greater square footage, suggesting that you are more likely to go to store b for greater available utility.

This notional gravity can be influenced by a number of things...

So, i think of a number of elements i can weave into a formula like this (complexity, cost, marketing spend, programatic adoption schemas). One flaw, the law assumes you ARE a buyer. Now, i always heard this law described as Two pizza parlors in a strip mall will EACH do better if another pizza parlor moves in, than if they were operating singularly (i guess the distance cited above).

So, MSFT, based on size, certainly could be argued to have the gravitational PULL- however, each and every other pizza parlor will benefit.

Thoughts ??

Unless you are living on Mars, or heads down updating your Facebook profile, chances are you heard the news yesterday that Microsoft held their coming out party for VDI.

There was some re-assurance on their Citrix XenDesktop strategy, RemoteFX (calista) exposure, and Dynamic Memory allocation tech, as well as some sales promotions. Oh, yeah, they also eased up on painful VECD licensing schema that so many of us flailed to describe to customers - tapping out with a predictable - "yeah, its kind of expensive and limiting".  Gone. Phewww.

I shall refrain from political commentary and instead focus on what I feel this means: VALIDATION+INERTIA

VALIDATION:

For many of us, the past 4-5 years have been about extolling the benefits of changing the compute architecture of end users. Yes, TS and Presentation have been around since forever, and so i guess i am (surprise) referring to full OS compute environments either in a data center, cloud, client hypervisor, etc - as well as APP, Profile, and Data abstraction and "virtualization" or, as i call it, VDI. 

Yesterday, the sleeping (or patient) Giant awoke.

What this means: With roughly 600,000,000 desktop PC's in corporate environments around the world, and with roughly, what, 99% of those running MSFT operating systems, office, browsers, etc., when the Giant says it is time to consider these new virtual desktop strategies....baby, its time.

Now, there are 600 million PC's - a very large market. Some will choose solutions based on technology, some will choose solutions based on vendor preference, some will choose based on vendor revolt, some will choose solutions based on an article their CIO read on the plane, and others will be a hybrid chosen for imeasureable reasons, and yet others will realize that NONE of the solutions are a valid choice at this state of the art in the technologies, if ever.  However - they will all begin to choose.

Microsoft just said, "look at your 600 million desktops - there are new choices you can make"

Whether you sell software, hardware, services, clouds -  this is a good thing. If you are a customer, this is a good thing. 

Some of you know i am fascinated by theoretical physics, and here is my observation not grounded in theory, but fact :

INERTIA -  "is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion- either at rest, or in movement"

While we all have leaned into the desktop market to compel its motion towards VDI - my belief is the forces brought to this effort by Microsoft are what we all need to change its current state - cautious optimism. And this has happened before. When we were all sitting at our IBM Selectra Typewriters - and this thing called the PC came along - it was Microsoft through operating system standardization combined with an ever decreasing cost of hardware, that changed the state of motion of the user workspace. They were financially rewarded for that activity, gained dominance, and power....the power to move markets into motion.  

Now, in other markets (browser, search,virtualization,  etc) one could argue they were not first movers.  However, their presence in a market, validates it as real. Makes you wonder if the Gartner prediction that VDI will be a $65 billion market soon wasn't onto something ;)

As we all sit around this weekend and try to figure out "what does this mean for vendor XYZ" - relax a bit. What this means, in my opinion, is that every vendor needs to sharpen their pencils, products, and presentations because this now IS, the year of VDI.

Enjoy

T.Rex

Founder+COO

Liquidware Labs Inc.

jtr@liquidwarelabs.com 

OK sports fans, get ready with those hisses and boos. Here goes....

"The iPad is the Ultimate VDI Endpoint" - T.Rex Rohrer January 28 2010

Why?

1. User Acceptance - the iPad passes the first smile test - a really cool form factor that end users will digg. Rich and robust local experience for the STUFF we do when we are not doing work. iPad/iPhone familiarity [ i heart my iPhone]

2. Ultra Mobile - small, light, just big enough, i probably will drop it less than i have my laptop. 

3. Always Connected -With 3g and wifi, I am in an always connected state. Offline will be dropped from the dictionary and wikipedia soon anyway, so - good to have this now.(or soon, i think April)

4. Remote App Delivery - Corporate can provision, update, patch, tweak, and entitle applications centrally, and deliver them to those of us that need them centrally. This boosts agility, manageability, drives down costs. This form of "VDI" mitigates some of the burden of OS costs. Again, depends what you need, depends on your config, depends on your Apps, depends on your users. Depends on the end point OS. But -  i used Citrix Receiver yesterday on my iPhone and i gotta be honest...creating a powerpoint in office 2007 on my iPhone (while not ideal in size) was surreal and cool.

5. Remote Desktop Delivery - Pure VDI as i like to call it. The desktop is centrally located. My IT folks provision, manage, and entitle them. Any device, any place, any time, i can view my desktop. Fully windows XP, WIn7, Google Chrome (another prediction i have) desktop, all my apps, profile, etc just waiting for me to port in. Yes, this is a why VDI bullet, But to use the iPad (ok, maybe with a keyboard dock) you have my vote. why have the desktop local.

6. I can now use the word CLOUD and not grimmace - in about 2007 bill gates and steve jobs at the D5 All things Digital predicted there would always be three screens in our life (until flexible size projection technology is perfected) Small phones, workspaces, and larger entertainment screen. Yes you COULD do all your work from one, but we PREFER larger for movies, smaller for convenience based tasks. So, this iPad blurs the lines a bit, BUT - i get a rich and robust local experience for what i PREFER to do, and, ability to interact with Cloud Services - like my IT departments VDI session they have waiting for me. 

7. Cost - i believe the ALL IN wifi/3g version will click in at under $700. So my IT guy can make me super happy, i get all the bells and whistles for non-work stuff, and she can deliver full corporate managed applications or full desktops to my device as she sees fit. 

8. Lack of Complexity [user]- one button and i know how to use it. One ICON and i know how to get to my VDI desktop (which is a windows session and we all have been assimilated to that). So, no training required.

9. Lack of Complexity [IT] - they buy and provision these devices. They stand up VDI farms. Aside from placing one icon on my iPad desktop so i can launch into their corporate controlled VDI farm....what can i mess up? Dont remember the last time i crashed my iPhone (or mac for that matter) with driver conflicts. :)

10. The "dude" Factor - required for the pervasive expansion of any new technology. I suspect the first time i fire up my iPad, click to launch into my VDI Win7 Desktop, use outlook, powerpoint, ftp some files around....i will utter ...."dude!"

Ok, for those of you who know me - ya know I  have pretty thick skin and can take the slings and arrows of disagreement. Those of you who dont...would really really really like to get your opinions on this.

is the iPAD the ultimate VDI ENDPOINT

[discuss]

 VDI C.O.P™

Coefficient of Productivity

The New Math of the Desktop

A [draft] Manifesto

 2009

J.Tyler “t-rex” Rohrer

We are compelled to move beyond the old math of the desktop not merely for reasons of justification of a new wave of available and potentially useful technologies, but rather because often times advancement of science leave us without proper vernacular and computation to accurately describe what we have just created.

Furthermore, we learn and adjust to our new nomenclatures not because they are clever marketing rouses but because they are functionally relevant, and make conversations of our subject matter contextually relevant. In addition, inclusion of new methods of explanation does not always compel us to abandon old ones.

While my economics professors told me that Economists existed to make Astrologers look credible,  when one observes organization after organization struggling to justify what they instinctively know can be accretive to their business, well, one must speak up. Here say I:

CAPEX: The Capital Cost Expenditure to acquire technology

OPEX: The Operational Cost Expenditure to deliver the technology in a useful way

C.O.P™ -  Coefficient of Productivity – the net incremental GAIN any new technology delivers to its users (both end users and administrators)

This coefficient shall be an index, inclusive of (but not requiring) any number of metrics including security, agility, recoverability, availability, ease of management, burdens on the organization (a negative) each representing a fractional percentage of 100% as measured by its impact on the adopter, and INTENDED to be customized for the specific adopter of any technology.  Theoretically there is no limit to the COP that may result from this exercise-meaning some technologies, sufficiently understood and applied, will yield COPs in any, and often significant degree. (think of the introduction of the PC, telephone, fax machine)  Conversely, it is possible that any technology will / can result in a negative COP.  This can be both because of its burden on productivity, or, (and the subject of further exploration) the mis-use, improper deployment, or, erroneous application to incorrect users.

To calculate the true effect of, and in consideration of, any new technology, one must take CAPEX/COP = True CAPEX

Ie)  CAPEX = $1000

        C.O.P = 1.097 (a 9.7% NET GAIN in productivity)

        TRUE CAPEX =  $1000 / 1.097 = $911.57

An interesting effect of this line of reasoning is that one can also use COP to look at the EMPLOYEE YIELD that results from the proper introduction of new technology to an end user (OPEX covers the gains to the admin).

Ie) If an organization can make a non-revenue producing employee who earns $100,000  1% more productive because of any new technology the generative effect to organization is mathematically $1000.  Expanded over hundreds or thousands  of users, this effect becomes meaningful.

Furthermore, in revenue producing employees – if an organization can enable a $1,000,000 revenue-generating employee capable of closing merely .5% more sales, this yields an effective return to the organization of  $5000. (and could also have a contributory effect on the fixed cost exploration above).

Clearly, the methodology previously used in the desktop space that “I can buy a $399 PC  why would I buy a $750 virtual desktop?” is flawed, and actually out of context.  I liken this to “ Why would I buy a $2000 personal computer when I have a perfectly sufficient $199 type-writer?”

A major underlying assumption of this manifesto is that the explored technology is/can be incremental to productivity gain. The absence of  tangible, and measureable gains compels us to abandon potential technologies. (yes, a car with 6 wheels will drive, but not more productively than a car with 4 wheels perhaps)

In addition, comparative analytics are also needed to not only look at the true cost of a new technology-in this case using COP, or, its productivity gains to the organization, but also this relative to the legacy or current solutions deployed.

One must conduct this analysis not in the absence of OPEX (operating) but rather in concert with such observation.  OPEX is often dismissed as “soft costs” and for that matter not taken seriously because such (if any) savings are not always visible, assignable, or, quite frankly, because the math to obtain such has previously been difficult. Understandably we have previously been exploring (at least in the desktop space, however, I suspect in most new technologies) OPEX and struggling to claim the instinctive productivity COP now describes, in those numbers.  Therefore, the New Math could look like:

OLD:

CAPEX + OPEX = TCO (and thus an Internal Rate of Return could be calculated)

NEW:

CAPEX/COP + OPEX= TRUE TCO (however, while we capture the net productivity gain of the technology and incorporate it into a cost analysis – we have NOT accounted for the incremental revenue possible, or burden employment costs avoided, by the technology) * This will be explored in a separate paper exploring employee YIELD under the methodology of COP*

While this paper does not intend to, in two pages, solve the current debate on the gainful utility of new desktop technologies, when one observes logic that can be improved, one is compelled to speak up.

Therefore, before the critics have their way with “COP” and the salvos of slings and arrows fly, I invite any and all for collaborative and constructive debate in the interest of perfecting this NEW MATH of the Desktop.

T.Rex

Standing on a Whale, Fishing for Minnows

Why VDI?

I have spent the better part of the past three years as an evangelist for the business and technical merits of VDI (and all of the associated hosted/streamed/hyper-vised/abstracted/delivered those three letters stand for these days.)

Yesterday, reading a document by Microsoft of all people on Windows 7 Migration, it dawned on me...clear as a bell ringing....why exactly we are all so fascinated with new desktop strategies. Here is my manifesto. Honest and brutal feedback welcome.

What is the Primary Driver for VDI?

• Capex Savings....nope, Capex is for Wimps. This driver will convince you to pay more I am betting.
• Opex Savings...nope, soft costs are cool, but there is more
• Agiligy....important, but nope
• Central Management ... a bonus, but nope
• Security...really important, but nope
• BYOPC .... cool, but nope
• Business Continuity ... valuable, but nope

Why VDI?

So, roll the clock back to 1977. Everyone is sitting at their nice and stable $299 IBM Selectra Typewriter, pecking away, writing memo's, putting them in bins, folding them into envelopes, and moving information around quite well. Doing their jobs. The typewriter not only cost a few hundred dollars...it only needed ONE SKU to support it give or take (a ribbon cartridge), hardly ever broke, and did the job perfectly, lasting for years.

A sales person comes in one day, and says " I have a new thing for you. It costs $2999, it needs about 20 Skus to support it, you are going to have to hire a bunch of people to learn how to work the software and stuff needed to keep it working. It breaks a lot. When it does, you may not know what actually happened, it will last about 3 years, then i will be back to sell you a new one, when i do, it will take a week or so to get them to you. Your users will have to sort of start from scratch. We call it a PC.. How many would you like to buy?"

The salesperson leaves, we say, maybe for some users, but gosh, at that Capex vs. what i pay now, i just can't justify it. Oh, and this is all taking place during the Oil Crisis, during horrible economic times.

And yet, within 5 years, almost every single typewriter on the planet was ripped out, and replaced with this new thing, the PC.

Why?

So, its now 2009. We have $299 PC's, and a Sales person comes in and says..."I have this new thing for you..I won't be able to match the CAPEX you spend now, i believe i can lower OPEX, I believe my technology leads to security, agility, easier management, disaster resiliency, and a host of other good things. Applications may get easier to use, you may be able to buy less of some stuff, but probably more of others. My solution comes in a million flavors, can be complex to configure, definitely will not work for everyone, is new, and ultimately may lead to your cloud dream fulfillment. We call it VDI. How many would you like to buy?"

The salesperson leaves, we say, maybe for some users, but gosh, at that Capex vs. what i pay now, i just can't justify it. Oh, and this is all taking place during the Financial Crisis, during horrible economic times.

And within 5 years, almost every single PC on the planet could be replaced by this new thing, VDI.

Why did we migrate away from the typewriter, to the PC, and why will we migrate to VDI?

Productivity.

If I pay an employee $100,000 a year, and i can restore 5% of the productivity lost by PC "issues" using a new solution = $5,000

If that employee contributes $400,000k in revenue to my organization a 5% increase in productivity = $20,000

If that employee can process 5% more files, logs, cases, calls, complaints....work =  what is that worth?

The current debate has me thinking we are "standing on a whale, fishing for minnows"

VDI is not about Capex. VDI is not about Opex. Those are nice benchmarks to pass smile tests. 

VDI is about Potential Productivity.  What would you pay for that?

J.Tyler "t-rex" Rohrer

September 11, 2009

VDI

www.dabcc.com/media.aspx 

OK, every now and then, we all need to TOOT our own horn a bit. So, here is a new Podcast I recorded for Douglass Brown (yes, a vdi.com patron member!!) that just posted today.

About 54 minutes long, however, hoping you all enjoy!!

T.Rex

Now, this could get pretty interesting

vmetc.com/2009/08/22/vmware-will-virtualize-google-chrome-but-will-chrome-run-vmware-for-vdi/

 viewyonder.com/2009/08/16/feeding-the-it-shriekometer-5-vdi-anti-patterns/

Thanks to Steve Kaplan on TWITTER for finding this... thanks to ViewYonder for a very intelligent piece !

www.pcworld.com/article/170038/vmware_loses_its_magic.html 

Wow...where to begin. In the interest of proper disclosure, VMware did buy my last company and i did work there as a desktop subject matter expert for 14 months, however, that also gave me insight into the inner workings of the company that DEFINED the virtualization market.

No, VMware has not lost its mojo. It is going through the growth curve every company does when it creates radical new technology, spawns a multi billion dollar market, sees competition enter, and defends.

Pundits beat these companies up, because it sounds and sells more than RA ! RA ! RA !

I had a typewriter.

I had a calculator.

I had a PC.

IBM, Texas Instruments, and Dell are all still here.

So, now i have VDI. 

10 Years from now, VMware will be here, MOJO in tact.

And we will be beating up some other new technology innovator who has grown from the garage to IPO.

Just my $.02

T.Rex

So, i read this...

news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm 

then thought this...

If MSFT truly is, and i have heard this on first hand account, not thrilled and uncaring, and maybe even hostile towards VDI, ala their pricing schema for windows Os's inside of desktop VMs .. well, we have all chased the fabled linux desktop like we search for unicorns...so, what if 

GOOGLE ANDROID is the new desktop OS??

Hmmmm..why not?

blog.bobpeers.com/2009/02/12/google-android-in-virtualbox/

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Cisco® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) and Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) with VMware® Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) reduces the cost and complexity of managing desktops by optimizing virtual desktop delivery over the WAN while avoiding costly bandwidth upgrades.
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This jointly validated solution improves employee productivity by combining VMware VDI for virtualizing and centralizing desktops and Cisco WAAS for compressing and accelerating Microsoft Remote Desktop (RDP) and optimizing branch-office printing.
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Cisco WAAS increases the scalability and number of VMware VDI users supported over the WAN, and Cisco ACE improves the availability and scalability of data center VMware VDI.
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Enterprise business continuity is improved by reducing the amount of time required for backup and replication of data center VMware VDI.
Business Challenges
Customers use desktop virtualization solutions such as VMware VDI to replace traditional PCs with virtual machines that are managed from the data center to reduce operating costs, increase control of desktop management, and extend business continuity and disaster recovery to enterprise desktops.
However, when desktop virtualization solutions are deployed over the WAN, latency and bandwidth constraints limit the effectiveness of virtual desktop solutions. Customers face the following challenges in deploying virtual desktop solutions for the enterprise:
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Poor performance of RDP over the WAN, affecting employee productivity
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High bandwidth consumption, increasing solution costs
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Limited scalability, reducing the number of users that can be supported
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Poor performance of centralized printing and increased costs of printing at the branch office
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Considerable time and bandwidth required for transfer of virtual images, affecting business continuity
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Need to maintain continuous availability within and across the data center for the VMware VDI solution
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High server resource consumption for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) functions, resulting in a large number of servers
VMware VDI Overview
VMware VDI is an integrated desktop virtualization solution that delivers enterprise-class control and manageability. VMware VDI, built on the industry-leading VMware Infrastructure, provides an efficient and reliable environment for virtual desktops.
The VMware VDI solution consists of the following components (Figure 1):
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VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise software, which provides a platform for hosting virtual desktops including the VMware ESX and VMware ESXi software
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VMware Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM), a desktop management server that securely connects users to virtual desktops in the data center and provides an easy-to-use web-based interface for managing the centralized environment
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VMware VDM Client, which runs on a Microsoft Windows PC and allows users to connect to virtual desktops through VMware VDM; VMware VDM Clients of VMware VDM certified thin clients connect using Microsoft RDP
Figure 1.
VMware VDI Solution Components
Cisco WAAS Overview
Cisco WAAS is a comprehensive WAN optimization solution that accelerates applications over the WAN, delivers video to the branch office, and provides local hosting of branch-office IT services. Cisco WAAS allows IT departments to centralize applications and storage in the data center while maintaining LAN-like application performance and to provide locally hosted IT services while reducing the overall branch-office device footprint.
©2008 Cisco | VMware. All rights reserved. Page 2
Cisco WAAS enables organizations to accomplish four primary IT objectives:
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Application acceleration: Improve productivity of remote employees.
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IT consolidation and WAN optimization: Reduce branch-office IT costs.
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Branch-office IT agility: Provide local branch-office IT services such as printing without additional servers.
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Simplified data protection: Ease compliance and business continuity.
The Cisco WAAS solution provides application-specific acceleration and hosted services validated by application vendors, proven network integration that preserves existing network services and simplifies operations, and lower overall cost of ownership
Cisco ACE Overview
Cisco ACE provides core server load-balancing services; application acceleration through server offloading; and security services to maximize application availability, performance, and security. The Cisco ACE is coupled with an innovative virtualized hardware platform, application-specific intelligence, powerful performance, and granular role-based administration. By delivering up to 16 Gbps of throughput and support for up to 4 million TCP concurrent connections, the Cisco ACE can handle large production environments and be partitioned for sharing across multiple application or service environments. Using Cisco ACE, IT departments are better positioned to achieve the following business benefits:
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Improved application availability and scalability
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Cost reduction through virtualization
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Improved application performance using server offloading
Joint VMware and Cisco Solution
The jointly tested and validated solution from Cisco and VMware optimizes virtual desktop delivery and consists of the following components (Figure 2):
Figure 2.
VMware VDI Solution Components ©2008 Cisco | VMware. All rights reserved. Page 3
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VMware VDI and VMware VDM to virtualize and centralize desktops
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The virtual desktops hosted on VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise in the data center
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The VMware VDM Connection Server allows remote branch users to connect to their virtual desktops in the data center running on VMware ESX Server.
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Cisco WAAS to accelerate RDP performance and reduce bandwidth demands
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Cisco WAAS, deployed on both sides of the WAN optimizes RDP traffic between the end users and the data center using a sophisticated combination of TCP optimizations that reduce the effects of the WAN, persistent session-based compression, and data redundancy elimination. Cisco WAAS is used to optimize VMware VDI delivery, including Microsoft RDP, the underlying protocol used by the current version of VMware VDM and currently the predominant protocol used by the various virtual desktop implementations.
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The data center also hosts a Cisco WAAS Central Manager, which is used to manage the Cisco WAAS solution from a central point.
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The branch-office Cisco WAAS appliance provides print services locally to branch-office users by running Microsoft Windows print services.
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Cisco WAAS can be deployed between data centers to optimize backup of VMware VDI for disaster recovery (not shown in Figure 2).
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Cisco ACE to improve availability and scalability of data center VMware VDI infrastructure
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The Cisco ACE appliance load balances virtual desktop connections among multiple VMware VDM Connection Servers based on application response time, providing scalability and resiliency to the VMware VDI solution.
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Cisco ACE reduces the number of VMware VDM Connection Servers required by offloading SSL functions to the network. With reduced costs due to SSL offloading, customers can more easily afford to adopt SSL for VMware VDI applications. Cisco ACE also enables centralized management of SSL certificates.
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Cisco ACE virtualization enables customers to partition a physical Cisco ACE device into multiple isolated virtual Cisco ACE devices, each with all the capabilities of the physical device. This virtualization capability facilitates data center consolidation, reducing the number of load balancers needed and reducing power and cooling requirements.
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The Cisco ACE appliance is typically deployed in front of the VMware VDM Connection Servers.
Solution Benefits
Performance Acceleration
The combined solution accelerates the performance of all applications accessed through VMware VDI, such as Microsoft Exchange for email and calendars and the use and sharing of Microsoft Office do***ents such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word, as well as enterprise websites.
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Cisco WAAS accelerates VDI performance by 70 percent (Figure 3).
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Cisco WAAS provides near-LAN performance for VMware VDI over the WAN.
©2008 Cisco | VMware. All rights reserved. Page 4
Figure 3.
Performance for 1.5-Mbps WAN, 100 milliseconds (ms) round-trip time (RTT), and 15 Virtual Desktop Users
Bandwidth Optimization
A single enterprise virtual desktop user can consume more than 300 Kbps of bandwidth, increasing WAN costs and degrading the end-user experience (Figure 4).
Cisco WAAS reduces RDP bandwidth demands by 70 percent, saving expensive WAN costs.
Figure 4.
WAN Bandwidth Reduction: 1.5 Mbps, 100 ms, Single User ©2008 Cisco | VMware. All rights reserved. Page 5
Availability
An individual VDM Connection Server does not provide adequate availability in the event of hardware or software failure. To help ensure continuous availability, multiple VDM Connection servers are required for the VMware VDI solution.
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Cisco ACE monitors the health of the application and load balances the traffic to any available VMware VDM Connection Server.
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Cisco ACE maintains the affinity between the client and the VMware VDM Connection Server using session persistence.
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Cisco ACE improves availability by replicating connection and persistence information to the standby server and providing instant application service failover.
Scalability
A T1 or 1.5-Mbps WAN link can support fewer than 10 users using native RDP, making virtual desktop deployment prohibitively expensive for many customers.
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Cisco WAAS increases the number of VMware VDI users that can be supported on a given infrastructure by 4 times (Figure 5).
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Cisco WAAS provides uniform, scalable performance for all users. With native RDP, the user experience rapidly degrades with the addition of users.
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Cisco ACE improves the scalability of the data center VMware VDI infrastructure. As additional users are migrated from traditional PCs to virtual desktops in the data center, increasing numbers of VDM Connection Servers are required.
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Cisco ACE exposes only one virtual IP address for users to connect to regardless of the number of VMware VDM Connection Servers in the data center and load balances user requests across them.
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Cisco ACE reduces CPU and memory use on VMware VDM Connection Servers by offloading SSL functions to the network, thereby freeing resources to handle more users.
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With virtualization, Cisco ACE can also be used to load balance other applications in the data center without affecting the VMware VDI solution.
©2008 Cisco | VMware. All rights reserved. Page 6
Figure 5.
Effect of Additional Users on Session Response Time
Optimized Printing
Customers face considerable challenges in printing in VMware VDI environments since the printer at the branch office and the virtual desktop image at the data center are separated by the WAN. Using Cisco WAAS, customers have flexible choices for selecting the right print topology for their environments.
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Cisco WAAS accelerates centralized print through printing-specific optimizations, data reduction, compression, and TCP optimizations to provide more than 70 percent improvement.
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Cisco WAAS provides a Microsoft Windows Server printer option on branch-office Cisco WAAS appliances, saving the cost of additional servers at the branch office.
Accelerated Backup and Virtual Image Transfer
Virtual machine images are backed up or transferred across the WAN as part of deployment and management of VMware VDI infrastructure (Figure 6).
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Cisco WAAS accelerates transfer of virtual machine images by 50 times.
©2008 Cisco | VMware. All rights reserved. Page 7
Figure 6.
Transfer of Virtual Machine Image over a T1 Link with 100-ms Latency
Business Benefits
The joint Cisco and VMware solution optimizes VMware VDI delivery and allows customers to achieve the benefits of VMware VDI by providing the following features:
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Near-LAN performance for virtual desktops over the WAN, improving performance by 70 percent
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Increased scalability of the number of VMware VDI clients, increasing the number of clients supported by 2 to 4 times, and massive scalability of VMware VDI and VMware VDM data center infrastructure
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60 to 70 percent reduction in WAN bandwidth requirements
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Optimization of printing over the WAN by 70 percent, with the option of a local print server hosted on the Cisco WAAS appliance
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Improved business continuity by accelerating virtual image backup by up to 50 times and reducing bandwidth by more than 90 percent
Conclusion
Cisco and VMware have worked together to deliver this joint solution, collaborating on lab setup, solution testing, and validation of test results. Cisco and VMware jointly validate that the lab setup and solution testing represent best efforts in creating a realistic customer deployment and accurate do***entation of such deployment.
Cisco and VMware recommend that customers use this jointly tested and validated solution to deploy optimized, scalable virtual desktop solutions to reduce infrastructure costs and improve management control.
©2008 Cisco | VMware. All rights reserved. Page 8
©2008 Cisco | VMware. All rights reserved. Page 9
Cisco and VMware intend to continue to enhance this partnership to develop joint solutions for optimizing virtual desktop delivery in the enterprise.
For More Information
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Cisco Application Networking Services for VMware: http://www.cisco.com/go/optimizevmware
● Cisco Application Networking Services: http://www.cisco.com/go/applicationservices
● Cisco Application Networking partner portal: http://www.cisco.com/go/optimizemyapp
● Cisco WAAS Software product information: http://www.cisco.com/go/waas
● Cisco ACE product information: http://www.cisco.com/go/ace
● VMware virtual desktop product information: http://vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization.html
● VMware VDI product information: http://vmware.com/products/vdi/
©2008 Cisco | VMware. All rights reserved. Page 10
For more information, visit: www.vmware.com
Cisco Systems, Inc. 170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134-1706 USA www.cisco.com Tel: 408 526-4000 800 553-NETS (6387) Fax: 408 527-0883
VMware, Inc 3401 Hillview Ave Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA www.vmware.com Tel: 1-877-486-9273 or 650-427-5000 Fax: 650-427-5001
Copyright © 2008. VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. Protected by one or more U.S. Patent Nos. 6,397,242, 6,496,847, 6,704,925, 6,711,672, 6,725,289, 6,735,601, 6,785,886, 6,789,156, 6,795,966, 6,880,022, 6,944,699, 6,961,806, 6,961,941, 7,069,413, 7,082,598, 7,089,377, 7,111,086, 7,111,145, 7,117,481, 7,149, 843, 7,155,558, 7,222,221, 7,260,815, 7,260,820, 7,269,683, 7,275,136, 7,277,998,7,277,999, 7,278,030, 7,281,102, 7,290,253, 7,356,679 and patents pending.
Cisco, the Cisco logo, and Cisco Systems are registered trademarks or trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this do***ent or Website are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (0807R) C11-494994-00 09/08

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