Master of DisasterAn interactive eZine from IDG Enterprise

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Supercharge Your End Users with Desktop Virtualization

A Better Path to Windows 7

View from the Top: Desktop Virtualization and the End User

Master of Disaster

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hen an opportunity crops up to take advan-tage of new ways of thinking that can bring real strategic benefits, IT has to be ready to seize it. The advent of Windows 7 presents just such an opportunity with respect to

desktop virtualization. The rollout of any new operating system in the tradi-

tional fashion is a major undertaking, given the hundreds or thousands of machines it affects and the fact that IT must touch each and every one of them. Com-panies that are still running Windows XP will almost certainly be looking at a wholesale replacement of desktops and laptops to get the power Windows 7 requires. They may also find XP applications that won’t run on Windows 7 without upgrades. And all companies will have to spend lots of time testing to ensure that everything plays well together. That adds up to significant capital and operational expense.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The release of Windows 7 represents a natural starting point for a discussion of desktop virtualization, a technology that’s probably already on your radar.

Desktop virtualization represents a fundamental, stra-tegic change in the way companies manage desktops, in-cluding OS upgrades. You install Windows 7 once in your data center, and that’s it. From there, it can be delivered essentially overnight to all end devices, no matter where they are located—a huge boon for companies with sites around the country or the globe.

Desktop virtualization also enables you to make more-effective use of computing resources. You can extend the life of desktop devices, by essentially turning them into thin clients. At the same time, you can take advan-tage of any high-powered PCs you may have by stream-ing Windows 7 and any required applications to those machines, thereby reducing the burden on your server

infrastructure. If you don’t have as many high-powered PCs as you need, your power users can share a pool of servers, using what power they need when they need it but leaving cycles for others when they don’t.

Virtualization technology can also help you address application compatibility issues. Any applications that won’t play nice can be virtualized and then run side by side with the Windows 7 virtual desktop. In the process,

you’ll save countless hours of compatibility testing. And desktop virtualization brings new flexibility, such

as enabling task workers and office workers to access their virtual desktops from any device they choose, from wherever they may be. If a device breaks, they can sign in with a different one and be productive, whether they’re in the office, at home or on the road.

Windows 7 provides great benefits to IT and end users alike that you’ll undoubtedly want to take advantage of, but you don’t have to follow the same upgrade path as in the past. Take a hard look at desktop virtualization. I think you’ll find that it provides hardware savings in the short term and significant operational savings for a lifetime, because IT manages only one instance of each OS, application and desktop image rather than hundreds or thousands of them on individual desktops.

At the same time, as you’ll see on the pages that follow, desktop virtualization provides a superior computing expe-rience to those who matter the most: your end users.•

A Better Path to Windows 7

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By Mark Templeton, CEO, Citrix Systems, Inc.

SUPERCHARGE YOUR END USERS WITH DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION

It doesn’t have to be that way.“... all companies will have to spend lots of time testing to ensure that everything plays well together. That adds up to significant capital and operational expense. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

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How does your progress in desktop and server virtualization stack up against a research sample of more than 200 IT managers? Click here and check out the results.

Slide Show – New IDG Virtualization Research

ntil a few months ago, technicians in Columbus, Ohio, who track and main-tain HVAC equipment for Ingersoll Rand had as many as four PCs on their desk, each running a homegrown application

that monitored equipment at customer sites. Today, the same technicians have a single PC from which they can access as many as four virtual desktops to monitor all the same customer equipment.

In addition to reducing the clutter of hardware on their desks, the new setup is maintained centrally in the com-pany data center. There, IT can ensure that the desktop OS and applications are all up-to-date and running at peak performance. Each time technicians log in, they get a fresh desktop image, as if they had turned on a brand-new PC.

“It’s much more reliable now,” says John Wilson, man-ager of Application Delivery for Ingersoll Rand. What’s more, the technicians can work from anywhere they have an Internet connection. “The ability to work from any-where will change their on-call procedures,” Wilson says. And it will eliminate the need for workers to come into the office and will offer a new level of disaster recovery.

Ingersoll Rand provides just one example of the profound impact desktop virtualization technology has on users at all levels of an organization. Task workers such as Ingersoll Rand’s technicians get a more reliable computing experience day in and day out—and they can work from home if need be, with all the same capabili-ties as when they’re in the office. Office workers likewise enjoy complete mobility, with full access to applications and data, along with self-service capabilities that enable

them to address, on their own, issues that once required IT’s help. Engineers find that they have more than enough power at their disposal for graphics-intensive applications, even though they no longer have a top-of-the-line PC on their desk. In fact, they get the same power when working from home or on the road.

The net effect on the business is to create a more agile company. “IT is no longer the bottleneck for new business initiatives such as mergers and acquisitions, opening a new branch or moving a group of users from one office to another,” says Sumit Dhawan, vice president of Product Marketing and Strategy for Citrix Systems, Inc. What’s more, users are more productive, because they spend not only less time dealing with IT issues but also more time working, because they can get full access to their desktop from any Internet-con-nected computer.

Instant gratification The benefits of desktop virtualization become immedi-ately apparent once companies roll out the technology, Dhawan says. “Customers start desktop virtualization projects with a single, specific group of users, such as remote developers, in mind. Then they end up using the technology for any new expansion, because it can be done so much faster and is easier to maintain.”

And when it’s done right, end users get an improved computing experience. Citrix customers, for example, can employ Citrix Dazzle and Citrix Receiver to enable users to install whatever applications they need on any device they like. That gets to the idea of user self-

View from the Top: Desktop Virtualization and the End User

True Device Independence

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Complete mobility. Self-service. Increased reliability. More power. True device independence. End users stand to gain lots of benefits from desktop virtualization technology, benefits that make for a more productive, agile company.

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VIRTUALIZATIONVISION

• Self-service access to applications • Improved desktop reliability• Improved desktop performance • Complete mobility—access to desktop and applications from anywhere• Increased horsepower for compute-intensive applications— from any device • Improved productivity • Desktop access from any device— bring your own PC• Improved security

Desktop virtualization: End user benefits at a glance

SUPERCHARGE YOUR END USERS WITH DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION

service, which is obviously a major benefit for IT because it relieves it of the burden of installing applications on each desktop. But it’s also a ben-efit to end users, who like the idea of self-service because it mimics the way they use computers in their personal lives, going out over the Web and downloading whatever they choose. In the work environment, it enables them to more quickly get the applications they need and get to work.

“Self-service is important because today’s us-ers appreciate it and it’s key to streamlining man-agement for IT,” says Chris Wolf, senior analyst for virtualization at the Burton Group research and advisory firm. “With its Dazzle product, Citrix has created a user-centric interface that is intui-tive, so users can learn it with literally no training.”

Up to the taskThat’s only the first of many benefits users expe-rience with desktop virtualization.

The predominant beneficiaries of desktop virtualization to date have been task workers such as customer service representatives, Wolf says. “That’s a no-brainer, an easy win,” he says. “Those users have been very receptive to the virtual desktop, because it’s not as buggy as their

previous experience. They get a golden image that boots cleanly each and every time they turn on their computer.”

That has certainly been the case at Ingersoll Rand, Wilson says. “We’ve removed much of the ambiguity of everyone’s being an admin on their own PC,” with the ability to make changes, including downloading and installing software. “With virtual desktops, they can still make chang-es, but the next time they log in, any unauthor-ized changes will be gone, because we use one persistent image that they can’t update.”

Although not being able to administer their PCs was a change, it was one that Wilson and his team communicated to the technicians up front, along with the benefits the technology would bring, including the ability to work remote-ly. “We’re leaving that up to each support center; if they want to let people work from home, we’re making it available,” Wilson says. “It’s a nice car-rot to dangle to some people.”

The vice president of IT operations for a large company in the health care industry that has been using virtual desktops for its task workers for two years agrees that the ability for employ-ees to work from anywhere brings great flex-

ibility. One group of his customer service reps is allowed to work from home, and the company’s managers like the ability to log in from any computer and have access to the same desktop image. “Managers tend to travel among sites, so they definitely take advantage of that capability,” says the VP, who requested anonymity due to company policy.

What’s more, the technology has greatly im-proved the speed of its client/server-based order- taking application, which relies on centralized servers for processing. “You don’t have to send as much data across the wire,” he says. “The client is now in the data center, talking at LAN speed to the server and not at WAN speed from the remote location.”

Going mobileA group of about 20 “supermobile” users at the health care company also benefits from desktop virtualization. “They love it,” says the VP, noting that the group includes everyone from directors and VPs to managers, IT staff and developers. “It means that they don’t have to carry a laptop on the plane. They can sign on from any system anywhere and immediately have access.”

VIRTUALIZATIONVISION

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SUPERCHARGE YOUR END USERS WITH DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION

That kind of ubiquitous access has a direct effect on pro-ductivity, the Burton Group’s Wolf says. “Early virtual desk-top adopters see a 5 percent to 10 percent gain in overall productivity, because users log in from home, for example, and do work they’d normally do in the office,” he says.

Citrix’s Dhawan notes that, at least with his com-pany’s XenDesktop product, all desktop virtualization users are equally mobile. “The same degree of mobil-ity is offered for traditional office-based users, which is a requirement if you speak to these users,” he says. “Their lifestyle is digital. They expect to have access to the resources they need all the time.”

Ubiquitous power Desktop virtualization can also deliver benefits to power users, such as engineers who work with 3-D modeling applications. Although they have traditionally used high-end desktop machines, they can achieve even better performance with desktop virtualization, even though their CPU may be in a faraway data center. The reason is much the same as why the health care company’s client/server application works better in a virtual environ-ment, Dhawan says.

“The applications that power users employ are highly graphics- and data-intensive. With desktop virtualiza-tion, you never have all that bandwidth-intensive data travel over the wire,” he says. “Processing is performed in the data center, and the only data that goes over the wire is the display data.”

That’s a function of Citrix HDX technology, which applies a mix of hardware, software and network optimi-zation tools to ensure that all users are provided with a computing experience that’s the same as or better than when their applications run on a local PC, he says.

Wolf notes that early adopters are also giving their power users blade PCs—dedicated, high-end PCs that sit in the data center instead of on a user’s desk. “You can secure the computers in the data center, the users still get the raw performance they expect and they have dedicated hardware,” he says.

Staying secureIndeed, improved security is one of the big benefits of desktop virtualization, from an IT perspective and also for users. The major health care organization, for example, likes the idea that the code created by its outsourced application developers never leaves the company data center. But at the same time, those developers don’t have to deal with client-based antivi-rus and other security tools; they’re all taken care of by the central IT group. Because the user “desktops” are actually just images on servers in the data center, it’s far easier to apply all patches and updates this way than to track down hundreds or thousands of remote desktops and laptops. As a result, users experience less security-related downtime.

They can also begin working more quickly. “When we sign on new developers, we send them a token for network access, they fire up a browser and they get in. We don’t have to send them any data, they don’t have to send us code and they never take our software home,” the VP says.

Freedom of choiceAlthough it’s clear that desktop virtualization brings plenty of benefits to end users, it’s also clear that it’ll take more than one type of virtual desktop to meet the requirements of everyone from task workers to power users and mobile workers. Toward that end, Citrix recently announced its FlexCast™ delivery tech-nology, which makes it easy for IT to deliver any form of virtual desktop to any type of user, on any device they choose — from laptops to handhelds such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, Dhawan says.

Burton Group’s Wolf says that kind of user choice, along with the mobility desktop virtualization provides, can help with employee retention. “You’re letting employ-ees work in the environment of their choosing, not some static cube,” he says. “This is the time to step in and rearchitect your desktop. Treat the desktop as a work-space that IT manages but that is device-independent.” •

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Security

SUPERCHARGE YOUR END USERS WITH DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION

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sk any IT managers exactly when their company first set foot down the path to desktop virtualization, and they’re likely to struggle a bit. Not so with Landon Winburn, however.

Winburn is the Citrix systems administrator for the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), a sprawl-ing network of schools, research institutes, hospitals and clinics based in Galveston, Texas. He recalls all too vividly when his employer’s journey to desktop virtual-ization began: September 13, 2008.

That was the day Hurricane Ike slammed into Galveston with winds as high as 110 miles per hour. The third-most-destructive hurricane ever to strike the U.S., Ike left some $24 billion worth of damage in its wake. It also left UTMB’s IT operations in total chaos.

“It was crazy, all the stuff we had going on,” Winburn recalls. For starters, he and his coworkers had a data center with power but no cooling and a backup site that was only partly operational. Meanwhile, dozens of em-ployees had functioning computers but no place to put them, due to office flooding. They wanted the IT depart-ment to host their PCs in a server room, so they could connect to them remotely from home.

Winburn had a better idea. Why not virtualize those devices with Citrix XenDesktop instead? That would get the displaced employees back to work quickly without giving already exhausted IT staff yet more hardware to repair and maintain. “We ordered 100 licenses of XenDesktop and basically had it up and running in one or two days,” Winburn says. Problem solved.

Traditionally, most companies have cited issues such as easier management and tighter security to explain why they virtualized their desktops. But increasing num-bers of organizations are realizing what UTMB learned the hard way: that desktop virtualization can be a pow-erful disaster recovery tool as well.

“Quicker recovery from a disaster usually isn’t the pri-mary driver behind a desktop virtualization investment,” says Sumit Dhawan, vice president of product market-ing and strategy at Citrix, “but it’s often the benefit that most convinces buyers that they made the right choice.”

A portable desktopIn a sense, it’s no surprise that business continuity is often a secondary consideration when it comes to desktop virtualization. After all, desktops are often a secondary consideration when it comes to business

Master of Disaster

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Desktop virtualization proves a powerful tool when calamity strikes. By Rich Freeman

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Read interview.

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If your end users have picked up on the buzz about desktop virtualiza-tion and are asking, “What’s in it for us?” the answer is “Plenty.” Click here and read an insightful interview with one of the most promi-nent desktop virtualization experts.

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continuity. IT departments with detailed plans for get-ting their servers up and running after a calamity often give little thought to supporting end users with damaged hardware or no place to work.

And it doesn’t take something as dramatic as a hurri-cane to leave employees stranded. A pandemic such as the H1N1 flu or even a construction crew’s accidentally severing a power cable can close down an office just as effectively. In such cases, anyone without a laptop to take offsite is likely to have limited access, at best, to vital data and applications.

More and more organizations are coming to view employing desktop virtualization as an effective way to keep employees productive in such cases. Indeed, 57 percent of organizations planning to implement desktop virtualization say that improved ability to recover desk-top environments was a top factor in their decision-mak-ing, according to data from Milford, Mass.-based analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group.

It’s not hard to see why. A virtual desktop infrastruc-ture (VDI) enables users to access all of their files, programs, shortcuts and other customizations from any device with an Internet connection, no matter where it’s located. “By definition, when you create a VDI system, you’re creating a portable desktop,” says Mike Strohl, president of Entisys Solutions Inc., a Concord, Calif.-based IT consultancy and Citrix solution advisor. That means that employees affected by an emergency can easily work from home or a backup office on any hard-ware available, without first waiting for the IT depart-ment to restore all of their software and data.

Important considerationsOf course, maximizing the disaster recovery benefit of a desktop virtualization deployment does take advance planning. For starters, IT managers must ensure that the infrastructure supporting their virtual desktops is disaster-ready itself. “Redundant everything is a given,” says Cameron Sexton, a certified technology consultant at Aktion Associates Inc., an integrator and Citrix solu-

tion advisor headquartered in Maumee, Ohio. Virtual desktops are useless in an emergency if you don’t have adequate backup resources or if your primary data cen-ter is incapable of handling a sudden spike in activity.

Security is an important consideration too, given that dislocated employees may connect to their virtual desktop over a home network on a PC they share with their kids. “You have to build your infrastructure with the assumption that the people using it are on untrusted networks and devices,” Dhawan says. That could mean denying some employees access to especially sensitive data when they’re outside the corporate firewall.

To be sure your company takes concerns such as these into account, make certain that a desktop expert from your IT department participates in disaster recov-ery strategizing, advises Mark Bowker, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Many companies limit the planning process to server specialists who could over-look crucial, client-specific issues.

Here’s another tip from Bowker: Consider using appli-cation virtualization as a key component of your desktop virtualization projects. Application virtualization enables you to serve individual programs, rather than an entire desktop, to users. Call center operators and other work-ers with narrowly focused responsibilities often rely on just one or two systems. Streaming anything more than that to them is usually a waste of bandwidth.

For UTMB, meanwhile, what began as an exercise in crisis management has turned into a whole new ap-proach to client computing. Long after Hurricane Ike, all the desktops that Winburn and his colleagues virtual-ized in the storm’s immediate aftermath remain virtual-ized today—by choice. Users enjoy being able to work from anywhere, Winburn explains, and administrators appreciate receiving fewer client-related help desk calls. “The stuff just works,” Winburn says. “All those break-fix calls you normally have with your PCs are gone.” No wonder Winburn has come to see desktop virtualization as much more than just an antidote to disaster.

“It’s a nice little tool to have in your toolbox,” he says. •

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SUPERCHARGE YOUR END USERS WITH DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION