Get Ready for the Virtual Desktop Revolution
Sunday, October 17th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
At this week’s VMworld Europe, desktop virtualization was a key theme. That may not be big news, given that it is a show organised by virtualization giants VMware, but nonetheless the amount of vendors talking up their offerings in this relatively immature market was significant.
VMware CEO Paul Maritz suggested in his keynote that legacy desktops would make way for a new generation of virtualized desktops delivered via hybrid clouds (which are effectively the combination of internal datacenter resources and external cloud services). Aside from the usual suspects, a number of smaller, highly innovative companies with interesting new approaches to desktop virtualization were also conspicuous at the show.
Server virtualization has been one of the most important technologies in Enterprise IT of the last decade. It has become synonymous with several of the major datacentre trends: cloud computing, Green IT; utility computing. In a matter of years, what was a relatively unknown technology, confined to the darkest depths of test & development environments, has made the leap to become a truly mainstream part of IT infrastructure and a technology that is shaping the future direction of computing in general.
If desktop virtualization had only half the transformational potential of server virtualization, we would be talking about it as the next big thing. In my opinion however, its effect on how IT is delivered and consumed could ultimately be more significant and wider-reaching than its older sibling.
To try and define desktop virtualization in all its flavours and guises within this blog would be pointless (if you don’t know what it is, then Wikipedia is as good a place to start as any). Suffice to say, it’s about abstracting the desktop environment from the underlying hardware, so that applications are available for a range of different devices.
This could be seen as a technological movement running in parallel towards roughly the same ends as cloud computing and SaaS – making applications easier to deploy and access. However, the impact of virtualizing clients has potentially huge repercussions for IT departments, end-users and device manufacturers.
Centralized delivery of data and applications, if done properly, should mean simplified security, application provisioning and management. It also moves us even further away from a device-centric view of IT consumption and closer to a more user-centric model. Information should ultimately be linked to a user identity, not unnecessarily tethered to a device.
If we take desktop virtualization to its ultimate end-game scenario, then we could find ourselves in a situation where devices become completely commoditized and are simply a way of connecting to centrally provisioned applications. Data could simply be streamed (fully encrypted) from the datacentre to the device which would receive data in much the same way as a walkie-talkie receives a radio signal.
All this is some way off and of course dependent on many technologies and trends converging further down the line. Standardisation – that ever-elusive IT utopia – will be as important as improvements in the underlying virtualization technology. Connectivity will also be a vital part of the equation, both in terms of pervasiveness and speed; virtualization vendors are already delivering technologies where users can ‘check out’ virtual desktops for offline use, but this would appear to simply be a stop-gap measure. Ultimately you would want a pretty-much permanent connection to make a virtualized model work.
The desktop virtualization landscape is much more complicated than I’ve made it sound, but if it ever truly reaches maturity, watch out! Along with cloud-computing, it has the potential to completely shake-up the way the relationship between users, data and devices is defined.
