Streamlining for agility

In the opening Industry Insight, I covered some background information about the world of virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), including concepts and a brief explanation on the workings and benefits of the technology. A bit of a teaser was left at the end about the option of having a well-managed infrastructure instead of a VDI environment.

Let me elaborate a little further on this concept. Take aside the costs of moving into a VDI environment... a lot of organisations are looking to VDI because it is perceived to be easier to manage and support. While this is true in some respects, it is not really introducing too many new concepts.

It is not always necessary to invest in and implement new technologies to solve issues.

Scott Orton is co-founder and sales director of Triple4.

As mentioned before, simply moving 400 desktops into a virtual environment is not really solving many problems; companies still have 400 versions of Office to deploy and 400 desktops to provide support to. In fact, now there needs to be support for 400 thin clients or machines being used with the connection broker, so it may add to support costs.

Take a look at some of the benefits from a simple VDI solution:

* Ease of desktop deployment, because a desktop template can be created with all the relevant software pre-installed.
* Fast deployment times, because the image is normally stored on decent speed storage, which would be deployed in the virtual environment.
* Ease of access, because thin client technologies are used; a user can use any thin client or machine to access their desktop environment. So if a user's thin client is not working, it can move to another user's machine and continue to work.

Unless it is time for desktop replacement in the business, the costs of VDI could be seen as quite prohibitive to obtain benefits that don't really add too much value, and more often than not, the virtual environment has to be upgraded to cater for the additional load of a VDI solution.

Now it is time to throw some controversial ideas around. Traditional desktop environments can be more agile and streamlined if they are managed properly. Over many years, Microsoft has worked hard on improving its Active Directory offering to provide organisations with the ability to control devices on the network.

In fact, there is almost nothing that cannot be controlled and configured on a Windows desktop these days by using group policies within Active Directory. So let's take a look at the benefits listed above and provide some solutions that already exist within most Microsoft-based corporate networks:

* Windows Server provides the ability for deployment of workstations with quite a decent amount of accuracy by using Windows Deployment services. A fair amount of initial configuration is required, but once mastered, machine deployment is easy and works well.
* Many technologies exist within group policies to aid terminal server deployments, one of which is roaming profiles, which enables a profile to move wherever the user logs on from. In a terminal server environment, this means whatever server a user may log on to. Who is to say a user can't deploy this technology in a normal desktop environment. Perform a decent amount of planning and users can work in a hot desk scenario and work from any desktop. The technology is there, but often seems to have been forgotten about.

When it comes to software deployment and the management of software, regardless if users are using VDI or traditional desktop environments, additional software is needed; they may be something similar to Microsoft System Centre Configuration manager. The VDI vendors such as Citrix and VMware include technologies to assist with software management and deployment in their more premium bundles of VDI solutions.

The point I am trying to make? A little bit of effort spent with technologies that organisations may have already purchased goes a long way to improving support procedures and user experiences. It is not always necessary to invest in and implement new technologies to solve issues or add features. It seems as though IT support and deployment teams have gotten a little lazy with assisting organisations to streamline processes and be more agile or dynamic.

I have written quite a bit about VDI using thin client technologies to enable users to connect to their virtual desktops to bring about the rich desktop experience of, say, Windows 7.

Through this time and investigation of VDI from IT owners, perhaps through all the blurb and hype, something has been overlooked. That little something is simply called 'terminal services', or for a few more enhancements, Citrix Xen App. They are both thin client technologies, both require fewer resources than a VDI solution and offer similar benefits.

So what is wrong with traditional thin client computing? I will cover that in the next Industry Insight.

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