Sam Routledge's Blog

Yesterday, Microsoft made an important announcement regarding virtual desktops. Currently, if you want to use any form of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, you need to pay an additional fee for a Virtualised Enterprise Centralised Desktop (VECD)  license. The headline news is that the replacement for VECD, Virtual Desktop Access (VDA), will be a Software Assurance Benefit as of 1st July – so effectively free of charge to customers who maintain Software Assurance on their desktop operating system licenses. If you don’t have SA, VDA will be slightly cheaper than VECD.

This is really good news for anyone operating in the desktop virtualisation space, as it removes one of the blockers to adoption of this technology. It’s fantastic news for our customers as it means that they can make a decision on which technology to use independent of the licensing costs. There are seriously compelling reasons now for ensuring that you have SA on your desktop operating systems now, with VDA included and access to MDOP for a pittance – which gives you App-V for application among other things. Looks like a very cost-effective way of gaining access to some of the most exciting recent technology developments around desktop delivery.

Interesting also to see Microsoft taking the fight to VMware PCoIP with their forthcoming RemoteFX 3D and graphics acceleration technology, which will be extended by the impressive Citrix HDX. Microsoft are certainly serious about the partnership with Citrix, and those two are equally serious in their desire to compete for the virtual desktop with VMware.

Whichever vendor you favour, the real winners here are current and potential customers of VDI technology. Not only is your choice increased, but the licensing terms will be considerably more favourable come 1st July!

I’ve usually got a technology are or two to bang on about as my ‘next big thing’. My current obsession is the advent, theoretically within the next six months, of ‘client hypervisors’. As I mentioned in my earlier post about ‘Next Generation Desktops’, we’re seeing a lot of interest from people looking to change the way they ‘do’ desktops, and it seems to me that client hypervisors will be in interesting option.

The basic premise is a bare-metal hypervisor that is installed on the local desktop/ laptop, enabling one or more VMs to run locally on that hardware. Management tools should allow the IT department to deploy, secure, backup and maintain from a central point – at this stage it appears that the primary management platform will be through the major VDI platforms – this will effectively be ‘off-line VDI. Of course, the benefit of a bare-metal, Type-1 hypervisor over VMware Player or Microsoft Virtual PC is mainly in performance through direct access to the hardware.

I can see a few benefits of this model to IT departments:

Ease of management and deployment: truly driver-independent images (just needs to support the hypervisor); a backup copy of the VM, possibly synchronised at regular intervals, can be kept and re-issued in the event of hardware failure or VM corruption. If you’re going down the thin client route with VMware View or Citrix, you’ll be able to manage your offline desktops through the same tool.

Contractors: Assuming your contractors have appropriate hardware (hey, you could even demand this!), you can issue a secure, time-limited VM for them to use whilst doing work on your behalf.

Consumerisation of IT: My personal favourite – and something we are talking about internally at Softcat: give your users a laptop allowance, let them buy whatever suits them within certain parameters, and deliver them a secure, managed VM on which to do their work. IT no longer have any hardware to worry about, and hopefully you have a happier user community – who, perhaps, take more care of ‘their’ equipment,

I know that Intel, VMware and Citrix are hard at work on this stuff, and my understanding is that we should be seeing some commercial availability around the middle of 2010. Exciting stuff? I think it is…