Virtualization's Promise And Problems
Posted by
Charles Babcock
May 16, 2008
Experienced desktop virtualization vendors such as Citrix, VMware, Virtual Iron, and Hewlett-Packard offer a range of options. They can generate virtual desktops on central servers and let thousands of end users access them there or stream them to end-user machines, though this is more resource intensive. They also can generate virtualized applications and offer them as software as a service or stream just what's needed to users on demand.
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Arnett has tested the virtual desktop waters but isn't ready to let his entire company jump in |
But the trick to successful implementation of virtual desktops isn't which technology you pick, say two early adopters, but rather starting out with small, well-defined groups of users and developing a plan as you go.
Tony Arnett, senior systems engineer at Pentair Water Pool and Spa, has been testing virtual desktops with various groups of users for more than a year. For each target group, he builds a customized desktop, or "golden image," of a virtual machine suited to that group's needs. A golden image for accounting will have different applications and perhaps a different version of Windows than one for sales or manufacturing, though, he says, for testing purposes, he's made the images "very vanilla."
Arnett has implemented the virtual desktops on a set of three high-availability servers running VMware's ESX hypervisor and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3, with its tools for generating and managing VMs. Users get a Wyse V10L thin-client machine, a diskless presentation device that links to VMware's Connection Server. They self-install the thin client, connecting it to the virtual desktop using Connection Server, which manages users' access to VMs through the company's identity management system, Microsoft Active Directory.
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