Damn you VDI!….
Ok, so I’ll explain my personal thoughts on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure – aka VDI. Some of this comes in light of Brian Madden’s recent article on VMware’s View product and the future of their hypervisor. However, even before that article was posted by Brian, I made similar comments during the VMware Communities Podcast over a month ago. What I said was that VMware had no business being in the desktop and application delivery workspace and that they should focus on what they do best, hypervisors and VM management. I got some flack for the comment with statements like “Why shouldn’t VMware be allowed to expand their business”…”you’re just a legacy Citrix guy”…”I feel bad for Terminal Server people. They work extremely hard to deliver a desktop to users that they end up hating” Well, here is the truth, users don’t like VDI either!….at the moment.
First, let me explain some of my background on VDI. I’ve been enthralled with the technology for close to five years now, well before products like XenDesktop and View even existed. Even before VDI was a catch phrase, I was publishing Remote Desktop thru Citrix Secure Gateway as a way for users to access there office PC’s, much like a GoToMyPC technology, forever ago. The idea of using an XP VM instead of a physical desktop just made life a little easier. Then solutions like Provision Virtual Access Suite (now Quest vWorkspace) Citrix’s original desktop broker and LeoStream started to surface, and I tried them all.
Here’s my problem with VDI – I can’t find any value in it. Some of the marketing hype around VDI and its value are things like “You’re securing the desktop and data by putting it in the datacenter” or “you can extend the lifecycle of PC’s by turning them into thin-clients”. My favorite “desktops are now highly available and fault tolorant” or even “desktops are on-demand” Crap…all of it.
First let’s take a look at the cost of VDI….first you need a backend virtualization infrastructure. Only until recently, like this year, did companies like Microsoft and Citrix start giving away hypervisors for free. But if you’re a VMware shop (which most heavy virtualization companies that are looking into VDI are) using something besides View, you need ESX licenses which are well over $6000 for a 2 CPU server plus support. Next, you need Microsoft licenses…VECD to be exact which requires Software Assurance, which is about $58, regardless if you already own XP licenses covered with Software Assurance. There has been some new announcements about the pricing of VECD, long story short, Microsoft gets their money whichever solution you decide to deploy. Up next is the broker of your choice, lets say I go with XenDesktop Enterprise (because I want to stream apps and connect to terminal server apps) tack on another $225. Too expensive? Fine, last time I checked vWorkspace Enterprise was around $100 per user. I think Sun/Oracle is floating around $50 a license. Oh, you want real user personalization and can’t get the functionality you desire from User Disks in View, or UPM in XenDesktop, add another $50 per user for something like AppSense or RTO Virtual profiles (both excellent products, but at a cost) Next, your end point device. If you’re going to use thin-clients and want to assure that whenever someone figures out streaming video, audio, VOIP etc, another $300 per end-point. Finally, you need hardware to run your VM’s and storage to hold it all.
Which brings me to my next point – Hardware. If you take a standard virtualization capable server, something with 2 quad cores and 32GB of RAM like a Dell 2950, approximately $5000, and that will get you 30 users (By way of comparison, I can get 50+ users on the same server with 4GB of RAM thru Terminal Services) If you create 30, 10GB desktops, that’s 300GB of expensive SAN storage plus another location to redirect profiles, user data, home directories, etc. A few years ago I attended a webinar for Provision and a little know company called Ardence. Ardence had a technology that imaged an operating system and allowed it to be streamed to PXE booted VM’s that were read-only. I thought at the time “This is GREAT! Less storage requirement, and one desktop image to maintain!” Ardence was acquired by Citrix and is now know as Provisioning Server and its included with XenDesktop.
So lets look at a functional VDI solution and what it consists of, in this case XenDesktop (and I can do this with any VDI solution, I’m not picking on XenDesktop):
- Provisioning Server containing a number of read only images
- PXE enabled VLAN
- ESX Servers – XenServer 5.5 is great too, but see above, I’m a VMware shop with an EA.
- SAN – There are people who want to do VDI with local storage…Godspeed, hope your on vacation when that RAID controller fails and 30+ users can’t get to their desktop.
- Connection Broker – XenDesktop, View, vWorkspace, pick any of them…I don’t care
- Active Directory/GPO to authenticate, restrict and redirect
- 3rd party user profile management – I’m throwing this one in there because I can’t get UPM to do what its supposed to do, and I have a case open with Citrix support.
- Wyse Thin-OS thin-clients (which require FTP services and DHCP scope options)
Find me a desktop support person who is even remotely familiar with any of these technologies?!?! This brings me to another point, something Brian pointed out in his article. Server Virtualization is not the same as Desktop Virtualization. Desktops don’t act like servers, they’re dynamic, they change….frequently. Typically, in most organizations, the classic thick desktop, is supported by a desktop group group or a helpdesk. With VDI, you’re taking that entire environment and shifting it to the server group (usually the group in charge of virtualization) Depending on the organization, server guys need more from the storage and network guys to maintain virtualization.
I can keep going – The user experience….As of right now, its no better then RDP/ICA to a server. Ok, there is Wyse TCX (which VMware OEM’s for View) and Wyse VDA, great now I’m limited to only Wyse devices. Citrix HDX, which is still a tech preview and can only run on XP devices like a PC or an XPe thin-client – great, now I’m patching and maintaining thin-clients. There are a couple others out there as well, SolidICE, EOP from Quest, PC over IP. None of these technologies are mainstream, hardware, software or vendor independent. They all have some kind of tie in to some other technology. There is no “openness” to these products.
The bottom line and the point I’m trying to make is this. There are STILL WAY TO MANY moving parts in VDI to make it a seamless, supportable (by that I mean SLA) solution that gives end-users the same experience they’re used to with a desktop…and I don’t see it becoming this way anytime soon. It still can’t replace the desktop workstation…LOL, I just realized I haven’t even begun to start whining about mobile laptop users!!!
So go ahead, eat up all the VDI hype and roll it out to your task based workers who don’t require a lot of computing power, because they’re the only ones who can still do their jobs with VDI. I’ll make the case how you can still do it with terminal servers for a lot less.
Before I get some hate mail….Actually, I wouldn’t mind some, it would mean people are reading. Someone might be thinking…so then just use Terminal Server. I will…but I’m still obsessing over VDI because I do believe it is the direction the industry should be (and will be) heading. w00t!!! Desktops in the cloud!!! I always had this vision that one day your TV cable/satellite receiver or XBox would essentially just be an appliance with a hypervisor that could just stream different virtual images for what you wanted – PC, DVD Player, Internet Radio, Game Console, etc without being just a single OS craming all those features into one… Maybe play 3D full graphic games or run apps as a seamless remote session, from your phone, 50″ wide-screen plasm or your PC. VDI is real; just not ready, and I don’t think VDI will be enterprise ready this year or next.
July 27th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Hi Tony,
I liked your right up! I agree with much of what your saying. Especially regarding VDI requiring many moving parts. One part that’s missing is that much of what is done for a VDI project should also be leveraged for traditional desktops. Such as standard OS image, application virtualization, centralizing user data, etc. The reason VDI projects are such a huge headache for customers is because many of them don’t even come close to automating their desktops in a uniform fashion. That said, moving everything to VDI has its own challenges, especially living up to its own marketing hype. I think we’ll see a mixture of traditional desktops (using Application Virtualization), Client based VDI (e.g. Virtual PC and things like Microsoft MED-V), Server based VDI, and all kinds of other mixes. I don’t think there is a single solution for everyone, it will be a mixture based on the scenarios for a given business. I also think the new Microsoft VDI Suites Licensing will make it MUCH easier for a company to budget and execute an all Microsoft VDI solution. Is an all MS VDI solution the best (by itself)? No, but it’s “Enough” for businesses to get moving. BTW, nice blog!
-Conrad
July 27th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Hi Conrad! Thanks for the post…At BriForum, Joe Shonk demoed the new Microsoft VDI solution. Right now while it’s still a beta, it’s very confusing with next to zero automation. However I’m sure that will change. What I really think is interesting is how MS is positioning this as a framework, not a solution. If you look at XenApp, that is just an add-on to MS Terminal Services, it would be wild if we started seeing 3rd party solutions that install on top of MSVDI, like XenDesktop, vWorkspace, etc.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Tony, I believe your “Desktops in the cloud!!!” vision isn’t too far off. There was some recent substantial moves made recently which show prrof of this only there about changes that are slightly different from your vision. In the last couple weeks Cablevision Systems finally won a Hollywood legal challenge which blocked cable companies from storing all of your DVR content on their servers instead of a set top DVR in your home (http://broadcastengineering.com/news/supreme-court-cablevision-server-based-dvr-model-0706/ & http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-technology/20090629/US.Supreme.Court.Cablevision.DVRs/). What these articles are saying is basically in future you won’t DVR’s at you home anymore, but instead you’ll have a box gets you access to what you record which is actually being recorded on your cable companies server instead.
One other item of news that came up recently at the Game Developers Conference last March, was the announcement of the new OnLive gaming system coming online later this year ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive ). What OnLive does is similar to what Steam ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(content_delivery) ) is in the sense that you basically install some software onto a Mac or Windows System which then gives you access to the gaming content delivery. If you don’t have a Windows/Mac system or don’t want to use them, then you can then instead use the OnLive MicroConsole which is really just a thin client which connects you back to some sort of VDI instance. The amazing about this is their claiming that the will be able to deliver 720p HD video content of the game to your system which seems to be really remarkable.
I’m sure there are other things that are starting to bubble up other then these two, but I found these two very interesting, and I’m wondering if any of the concepts and engineering behind these can be brought back into the enterprise environment. If this does happen I really could see the enterprise going desktop going into the cloud be it private or public in less then five years. What’s your thought!
July 28th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Thanks for the feedback Craig! I love Steam, did they release a Mac client that I’m unaware of?