What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2012? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
2012 The Year When - VDI Flips to IDV and the PC Becomes Cool Again
Contributed
Article by Dan McCall, President and CEO, Virtual Computer
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI has certainly gotten a
lot of publicity over the past year.
With the marketing might of VMware and Citrix behind it, we would have
been a bit shocked if it hadn't gotten a lot of buzz. VDI has also been riding the wave of tablets
and a perception in the media that the PC-era is over. The problem is that while VDI offers some
exciting and powerful benefits, such as centralizing management and reduced
support issues, it also brings along with it some troublesome baggage.
Many companies have found server-hosted VDI to be difficult
and expensive to deploy - and after all of that investment, the end user
experience is not as good as what PCs have been already been delivering for
years. Challenges associated with
server-hosted VDI include high infrastructure costs, performance issues,
limited mobility, and it's very complex to build and deploy. The result is that
many companies have delayed their implementations, waiting for the industry
solve those problems. Unfortunately, one
of the bigger challenges for desktop virtualization as a whole is that the
market often equates VDI with desktop virtualization. With so much noise and hype around VDI, it's
easy to see why there's so much confusion.
However, VDI does not equal desktop virtualization. In fact, a different approach to desktop
virtualization maintains the centralized management benefits but uses local
execution to improve performance and drive down costs. While this approach has been in the market
for a few years, it's now getting the attention of the big industry players
such as Lenovo and Intel. In fact, Intel
has gone as far as to create a new category to describe this method: Intelligent Desktop Virtualization or IDV.
IDV offers a computing model where both IT and end users
win. IDV solutions provide IT the
ability to control and secure desktop images and devices while ensuring users
enjoy high-performance, mobility, and flexibility. By combining centralized management with
local execution, IDV enables businesses to reap the advantages of desktop
virtualization without extensive capital outlay, without compromising user
experience, and without completely re-working desktop management practices.
Because IDV runs locally, there is no dependency on the
datacenter for end users to do their work - in fact, users can be fully productive
online or off. This ability to run
without ties to the data center offers high reliability and eliminates any need
for a large-scale business continuity environment to provide desktop services
in the wake of server, disk or network failures.
As IDV gains momentum in 2012, we will see the
self-interested vendors describing the Post-PC era will find it harder and
harder to justify their rhetoric as every major analyst firm publishes reports
of near double-digit growth in the PC market.
There will also be changes in the market that revitalize the PC in the
eyes of the media - we won't be seeing just the same old PCs we've seen in the
past. The Ultrabook, defined by a
specification published by Intel for ultraportable laptops, is challenging both
the MacBook Air and iPad on both form-factor and cool-factor. With the awareness of IDV on the rise, the PC
vendors will be building VDI-killers for the desktop as well. These will be
small form factor PCs with green power management and a solid line up of CPU,
memory, and disk all for the price of a mid-range thin client. Bundled with IDV
software, these will cement the fact that that VDI and thin clients cannot
compete with IDV and PCs.
One of the things that will fuel the growth of IDV is the
accelerating adoption of Type-1 client hypervisors. Type-1 hypervisors have driven the growth of
server virtualization to the point where when companies roll out new servers,
the default deployment model is using a Type-1 hypervisor. This is because the
virtualization provides tremendous manageability benefits, and the Type-1
hypervisor provides the most powerful performance and security
capabilities. A true Type-1 hypervisor
has no operating system running between the hypervisor and the hardware,
allowing it to directly interface with the hardware to maximize
performance. Type-2 hypervisors, on the
other hand, run on top of an operating system, which consumes resources and
introduces security challenges. Type-1
hypervisors are so superior to Type-2 that in the mature world of server
virtualization there are is no Type-2 option.
Building a Type-1 hypervisor for the client is a challenging
task because the hypervisor must be able to support a wide range of client
devices, buttons on laptops, web cameras, and other hardware that is
non-existent in the world of server virtualization. However, the end result is worth it because the
hypervisor delivers the highest level of performance and security possible
while minimizing the complexity of the deployment. Unlike VDI, where the
customer gets stuck dealing with the complexity of making it all work, in the
Type-1 IDV model, the product vendor takes on the hard work resulting in a
solution that greatly simplifies implementation and operation.
The recognition that the Type-1 client hypervisor is very
difficult to develop has led some solution providers to offer something that
appears to be a "bare metal" or Type-1 hypervisor, but in reality falls quite
short. These solutions offer an integrated
installer that installs a Linux on a bare metal workstation and installs a
Type-2 hypervisor (such as VMware player) on top of Linux as a part of the same
installation cycle. This installer creates the misperception that a Type-1
hypervisor is being deployed, and some are even marketed as a Type-1. However, the hypervisor in this type of solution
is still a Type-2 hypervisor and is totally reliant on the underlying Linux
operating system.
What makes a true Type-1 hypervisor is that it is in
complete control of all of the hardware resources on the server or desktop
computer, that it allocates all of the hardware (CPU, memory and disk) to the
virtual machines running on it, and that it is not reliant on another
underlying operating system below it to function. These are the characteristics that give Type-1
hypervisor's their performance and security advantages. Organizations
looking to implement IDV solutions should probe to make sure they are getting
the real thing.
2012 won't be the "Year of IDV" quite
yet, it will take another year for the market to mature. But it will be the
year we start reading about successful desktop virtualization deployments
rather than failed deployments using VDI.
###
About the Author
Dan McCall is the President and CEO of Virtual
Computer, which was recently ranked one of the top four desktop
virtualization providers along with Microsft, Citrix, and VMware, by an
independent third party survey.