Scenario

As the CIO at her university, Marilyn increasingly finds herself squeezed between the demands of the user community for robust IT services, even as the list of supported devices and applications grows seemingly daily, and pressures to control if not scale back IT expenses. As if maintaining the institution’s 3,500 workstations with current software, security patches, and necessary configurations were not enough to keep Marilyn’s staff booked, student and faculty requests have intensified for support of all the mobile devices on campus. Meanwhile, each fiscal year brings news that the IT budget has either remained flat or been cut. Having followed the development of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) tools, and having read about VDI implementations at universities similar to hers, Marilyn decides that the time is right to pursue it at her institution.

After researching and piloting the available vendor solutions, Marilyn and her staff choose a VDI product and spend a semester implementing and testing it. With VDI, the existing workstations around campus become clients that access a “virtual desktop” over the network. Whenever a user logs in to a computer, the system delivers the appropriate set of software and services based on the user’s role. When that user logs out, the next user will have access to a potentially different desktop. As soon as they install the VDI application on their personal hardware, students, faculty, and staff can use their own computers—whether on campus, from home, or on the road—and access the same desktop experience. They can also borrow computers from others and have access to their desktops, which are stored in the data center and delivered over the network.

Although the VDI implementation saves the university considerable resources and costs needed to support all of the institution-owned workstations and user-owned devices, the institution’s network requires some upgrades to make VDI feasible, and Marilyn has to fight that budget battle upfront. She also needs to rebalance the IT support staff, focusing skill sets more on network and infrastructure operations than on troubleshooting individual devices. These and other changes represent a cultural shift within the IT department, but in the end, overall costs are lower, users have increased flexibility and reliability, and, as an additional benefit, the university decreases its exposure to security threats.

1. Decoupling Hardware from Software

In a traditional computing environment, a personal computer serves as the host of the operating system (OS) and the applications, which together constitute the “desktop experience,” as well as the device itself (the “client”) that accesses that experience. Desktop virtualization separates the operating system and applications from the client device. The “virtual desktop,” which is typically housed on servers in a data center, is delivered over a network to client devices, which can be thin clients in an office setting, student laptops accessing a remote computer lab from home, or even traditional “thick clients.” In this way, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) delivers a traditional desktop experience through a managed infrastructure in which the processing, storage, and memory are delivered to devices that no longer host these components locally. With VDI, users can log in from virtually any computer and access the appropriate desktop experience.

2. Flexible Desktop Management

VDI provides a model of desktop computing that is much more agile and flexible than traditional solutions and uses resources in a more efficient manner. Because VDI decouples hardware and software, virtual desktop instances can be built, deployed, patched, and managed from one central location rather than having to do this in each individual classroom, lab, or office. Virtual desktops can contain the full set of software and features of a traditional desktop, essentially replacing it. Alternatively, users could retain a traditional desktop for most functions and use a virtual desktop for specific applications, which can provide greater security for those specialized applications because they are running separately from the user’s standard desktop. In some cases, the best approach might be something in between the two to realize the benefits of VDI while addressing possible downsides for some situations.

The flexibility of VDI enables classrooms and computing labs to be transformed from fixed environments, in which each computer is configured in a certain way, to learning spaces that are instantly customizable and tailored to meet the needs of each faculty member or class—an instructor can log in to a computer in a lab and see her desktop, and later a student could log in to the same machine and see his desktop. With VDI, learning-space computers can shift to any one of a dozen or even hundreds of different configurations in a matter of minutes simply by loading a different virtual desktop.

3. Enabling Greater Mobility

Because the desktop becomes a virtual image, VDI also increases mobility. All that is required is broadband access to run applications from remote sites. As a result, students no longer need to visit a physical lab to access specialized software required to complete assignments. Faculty and staff are afforded the same flexibility, enabling them to work from anywhere with a broadband connection and eliminating the need to synchronize documents across multiple machines. Moreover, VDI enables device-independence by allowing, for example, a user to run a full Windows-based desktop on a device such as an iPad that otherwise would not support it. Several VDI technologies also provide the ability to work offline, thereby overcoming a potential drawback of virtual desktops. In these instances, the virtual desktop is downloaded to the local machine as an encrypted image that can be used offline, and when Internet access is again available, any work done is synchronized back to the virtual space.

4. Easier Maintenance, Better Security

VDI provides a more secure computing environment in several ways. First, it changes the way desktops are patched and managed, allowing administrators to apply a single patch to the master image of a group of virtual desktops, cutting the time and increasing the frequency and accuracy of maintenance without additional labor costs. Second, housing desktop images in the data center increases the security of user files by ensuring regular backups—something many laptop users fail to do consistently—and providing tighter access controls, as well as minimizing the risks of desktop or laptop theft or loss. Finally, VDI solutions allow administrators to define “low-profile” desktops for specific, sensitive functions, such as processing payroll, issuing checks, working with HIPAA data, and others. Such low-profile desktop images minimize the vulnerabilities of sensitive systems and the data that such systems process.

5. New Pressures on Infrastructure

VDI requires a robust infrastructure to deliver a typical desktop image. Network bandwidth, powerful servers, and ample storage are needed to provide even basic functionality to a large number of users. If any of these fails, a potentially large number of users can be affected. Ensuring that your infrastructure can adequately support a virtual desktop infrastructure is critical but has the potential to make implementation of VDI costly. Additional servers, storage, VDI management software, and software licensing of operating systems and applications—all needed to get started with VDI—can add to the upfront infrastructure investment. Although VDI might reduce the number of hardware and software issues that users encounter, the burden of problem resolution is often shifted from frontline support staff (who have experience in desktop issues) to higher-cost, back-end support staff, including systems and network engineers, who are primarily focused on server and network support. In addition, cross-functional training and a focus on new support processes will likely be needed prior to implementation. These intangible costs can also be significant.

6. Changed Cost Structures

VDI changes the cost structure from a model in which individual devices have all of the computing power and software on them (and all of the associated hardware and licensing costs) to a model in which computing power (and, in some cases, software licenses) are centralized in a data center. In this way, desktops can be supported centrally, significantly reducing costs related to imaging, deploying, patching, and maintaining individual machines. Because the local devices don’t do any processing, they can be lower-cost thin clients that are “greener” (use less power), even while providing access to the same high-end, compute-intensive tasks. Such thin clients might also have considerably longer lifecycles than traditional desktop devices, resulting in further savings. The likely additional infrastructure costs required to strengthen networks, servers, storage, and backups to manage VDI will offset those savings somewhat, but overall costs should be lower. Each institution has its own cost structures and will need to determine the extent to which VDI changes them.

7. Finding the Right Uses for VDI

The virtual desktop marketplace will mature in the coming years to support increased demand, as institutions seek ways to improve their technology service and support models and decrease costs. Today, a relatively small number of larger institutions have started using VDI to offer virtual computing labs to students. Several smaller institutions are piggybacking off of these offerings, and still others are creating their own internal pilot programs to offer virtual computing lab services. The number of institutions exploring virtual desktop computing is expected to increase significantly over the next few years, both for virtual computing labs and for other desktop use cases. Current adoption for other use cases, including administrative computing, is still quite low, but should grow as VDI technologies, management tools, and processes evolve to meet specific needs.

VDI is evolving fairly rapidly, and different use cases will likely become more (or less) viable for VDI solutions over time. Institutions will need to clearly define their requirements and evaluate them against VDI benefits and constraints to determine whether virtual desktops are an appropriate solution. Because of the initial capital outlay and training needed to establish a virtual desktop infrastructure, look for institutions to form or join consortia, especially around virtual computing labs, to distribute the responsibility and costs. Vendors may also seek to increase adoption of VDI by offering cloud-based, hosted solutions.

June 2011

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