IT Expert Voice

Legions of enterprises are raring to go. They’ve been treating Windows Vista as if it was the swine flu, they’re itching for a new OS, they’re sitting on crusty client hardware that’s begging to be upgraded, and they’re hungry for the new generation of desktop virtualization (DV) technology. One medical center, University of Texas Medical Branch, is already testing the new OS in its push to expand desktop virtualization to cut patient response time.

Desktop virtualization: It’s been the scrawny stray cat lurking around your doorstep. Sure, some day, maybe, it would purr for us. Sure, somebody, maybe, we’ll have an operating system that’s got enough oomph for a virtual machine (VM) to run an application with response time that keeps users from banging their heads on their desks.

Is Windows 7 that someday for desktop virtualization? Or is desktop virtualization simply a low-cost, hassle-free way to migrate to Windows 7?

Both could be true, and it’s why the combination of Windows 7 and desktop virtualization is generating a quivery hopefulness throughout the land. “It certainly has a buzz in the marketplace,” said Kevin Gruneisen, director of platform virtualization for Logicalis, a provider of integrated ICT (information and communications technology) solutions and services. “Our customers are certainly talking about how they’re going to get to Windows 7 while at the same time taking advantage of newer virtualization technologies.”

Eric Linxweiler, senior vice president of Solution Services at Logicalis, said that for Logicalis’ clients, it’s all about how Windows 7 and desktop virtualization can lower costs. In particular, that means support costs, but it also includes costs associated with extending life cycles on client PCs or laptops from roughly two years to three.

The trick to extending the life cycle is that virtualization decouples what traditionally has been glued together: hardware to operating system, operating system to application, applications to each other. Once those components are decoupled and applications are hosted on servers in the data center, bits and pieces, instead of the whole enchilada, can be upgraded—centrally, to boot, without users dragging their systems in or IT dragging themselves out.

For an example of how virtualization makes upgrades less painful, Linxweiler pointed to a trucking company client in the upper midwest—he declined to give its name—that had some 3,000 desktops it needed to upgrade. Moving to Windows 7 wasn’t the project impetus; the company was actually looking to move to Exchange e-mail. But when the company saw how Windows 7 and desktop virtualization could improve user access and make it easier to centrally manage those thousands of desktops, they went for it.

“They found Windows 7 easy to use, and easy to support, given that it self-administrates many aspects of the operating system that were tricky or frustrating,” he said, including, for example, the ability to detect PC card manufacturers and compatibility. “When they saw they could improve user access and make it easier to manage, the project justified itself to roll out new user machines.”

People expect pain with a desktop upgrade like that. “But a lot of times, when they do a platform refresh, they find Windows 7 is pretty easy to roll out,” Linxweiler said. “It’s easy to have users do it themselves. With remote locations, they even had to have users upgrade themselves. It’s just a punch list to upgrade, and it seems to be progressing just fine.”

So desktop virtualization is a good fit for Windows 7 upgrades. In turn, performance improvements are what make Windows 7 such a better fit for virtualization than Windows XP has been. Jefferi Holland, senior technical architect of desktop virtualization solutions for systems integrator Systems Alliance, learned that happy lesson after testing Windows 7 for the past month. Holland, a desktop virtualization architect, wanted to see if Windows 7 could handle two different types of Type 2 (i.e., hosted software) hypervisors, Sun’s VirtualBox and VMware Server, run on top of desktop operating systems. He tested them on a laptop configured with a dual-core AMD CPU and 8GB of memory.

“There was no problem running these desktop hypervisors on Windows 7 with actual virtual machines running,” he said. In the past, Holland had tried running just VirtualBox on Windows XP and had problems with the application being unresponsive, he said, on a laptop configured with 3GB of memory and an Intel Core Duo CPU.

Beyond performance, deploying Windows 7 in a virtual desktop environment can save companies “a load of time and money,” Holland said, since the businesses no longer have to worry about whether their current desktop PCs meet Windows 7 system requirements.

That’s because when Windows 7 runs as a virtual desktop OS, the local PC no longer delivers the OS, applications and services the end user needs. All the local system has to do is to provide a mechanism for displaying the virtual interface, which is conveyed through a remote networking protocol, such as Microsoft’s RDP, Sun’s AIP, or Citrix’s HDX, said David Schreiber, Systems Alliance’s Director of Marketing. “This is the reason thin-client devices such as [Sun Microsystems’] Sun Ray are so cool. With desktop virtualization, there’s no longer a need for local data processing—all of the user interactions are occurring in the data center.”

Besides not having to worry about current client machines meeting Windows 7 system requirements, companies can also avoid “the hassle of backing up their current XP desktops and reloading—and configuring—those individual systems with Windows 7,” Holland said. “Even with all the hype surrounding its launch, back in October 2009 few customers I talked with were excited about using Windows 7 as their desktop virtualization OS.  What a difference a few months make! Increasingly, IT directors are excited about Windows 7 because it provides a rationale for justifying investments in desktop virtualization. As we move through 2010, I believe this will be definitely be the year of desktop virtualization, partially because of the desire to support Windows 7.”

That said, one thing companies need to keep in mind when considering Windows 7 for desktop virtualization is how Microsoft handles virtualization licensing, Holland warned.  Desktop virtualization has a reputation for being cost-prohibitive to start with, having hard-to-quantify returns on hefty initial investments. Analysts estimate that virtual desktops can cost from 150% to 250% more than traditional PCs, just for the initial technology outlay itself.

Microsoft makes it even stickier. The company requires customers implementing desktop virtualization to purchase VECDs (Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop) licenses—one per VM—in addition to the base Window operating system license.

But Holland says that, even with the added licensing costs, in his experience 18 to 21 months “is realistic” for seeing solid ROI. “Not bad, especially if you consider swapping desktop PCs for a true zero-administration thin-client device, such as the Sun Ray,” he said. “Unlike PCs, Sun Rays can last 10 to 15 years (they average 200k hours MTBF [meantime between failures]) and use a lot less electricity than an average desktop PC  (less than 8 watts vs. greater than 80 for the PC).  If the device fails, you can replace it with another device and keep on computing, no need to call IT for hardware support!”

It’s early yet to see results from full-scale deployments of Windows 7 and desktop virtualization. But one medical center, University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), has already started testing the OS for application compatibility in its DV environment.

UTMB has been expanding its use of virtualization for years. Every year, UTMB treats hundreds of thousands of patients, and it’s dealing with the same demands of all healthcare providers nowadays: Get electronic medical records to medical staff any time, support doctor and nurse mobility to move from room to room, and do it all without wasting time for log-in and application sluggishness.

After Hurricane Ike sent users to the IT department with waterlogged systems in September 2008, UTMB starting pushing virtualization for a number of reasons, said Landon Winburn, software systems specialist. First, it wanted users to be able to be able to access their desktop from anywhere. The second reason was virtual support: virtualization helped IT staff reach out to areas where it couldn’t before, he said.

Now, UTMB has a scheduled time frame of August or September for rolling out Windows 7 within that virtualized infrastructure. UTMB has been testing virtualized Windows 7 on top of VMware for about a month, hosting it through Citrix servers and virtual desktops, testing whether it will work in both 32- and 64-bit environments.

Everything works “pretty good, except some 64-bit stuff,” Winburn said. “There are some quirky apps we have down here that are relatively rare that probably won’t work in 64-bit.” But it’s not that those apps worked in Windows XP and doesn’t in Windows 7, he said—they’re just plain quirky on either platform.

One of the issues with Windows 7/DV is bandwidth, he said, but that’s an issue that’s not new with Windows 7.  A network running VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) has to handle aggregate traffic from many desktops to one location in the data center, making network capacity one of the issues companies grapple with when it comes to VD. UTMB deploys medical imaging across its thin clients and Citrix-published desktops, including large graphics such as MRIs, and like most companies, it’s “still tight on bandwidth,” Winburn said. There’s still plenty of Cat 3 wiring and infrastructure, resulting in many 10MG endpoints.

But while bandwidth is going to be tight for the foreseeable future, at least performance is going to be boosted by moving to Windows 7, he said. Indeed, Winburn sees why many are looking to Windows 7 as the “savior” to those who eschewed Windows Vista, he said.

“It was  a big bomb, it had bugs, and it was slow,” he said. “Windows 7 is faster, with a lot of [performance] improvements. It’s the next progression from XP. And at the same time, it’s almost about time that we can move to that type of OS. The hardware’s gotten a lot more powerful to where we can run this new OS without any issues. Computers with 5, 12, even a gig of memory are a thing of the past. If you don’t get multiple gigs, you didn’t get a good computer nowadays. And core counts have gone through the roof on servers. It kind of makes sense to move in that direction.”

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