VDI Rolling Review: Sychron OnDemand Desktop

VIRTUAL DESKTOP INFRASTRUCTURE

Rolling Review Kickoff
VDI lowers operating expenses while providing an extra dose of security--users can't install software, so a major attack vector is effectively closed down.

Citrix XenDesktop 3.0
Citrix XenDesktop 3.0 brings a small technology advantage to our Rolling Review of virtual desktop infrastructure products.

Ericom's WebConnect
Ericom's PowerTerm WebConnect makes a strong case for becoming a part of your VDI infrastructure.

Leostream Connection Broker
Connection Broker 6.0 is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product designed for organizations that have standardized on VMware ESX and VirtualCenter.

MokaFive
MokaFive creates a portable virtual machine that can run independently on any laptop or PC.

Sun Microsystems VDI 3
Sun Microsystems' new and improved virtual desktop offering, VDI 3.0.

Sychron OnDemand Desktop
OnDemand Desktop provisions and deploys VMs fast, but has a few quirks, too.

Virtual Iron 4.5 VDI
Since this review ran, Oracle says it will use the Virtual Iron suite to complement Oracle VM, its own server virtualization software. We have included this article for historical purposes.

Rolling Review: VMware Shows Agility In View 3
Since this review ran, VMware has revved View to version 4. We have included this article for historical purposes.

Wrap Up
The players in our review ran the gamut from smaller vendors that primarily act as connection brokers to brand-name server virtualization players.

In the third installment of our Rolling Review of virtual desktop infrastructure solutions, we take Sychron's OnDemand Desktop for a spin. Before the big names in server virtualization started paying close attention to the potential of virtual desktops, Sychron was already making a name for itself as a thought leader for developing solutions that enable quick provisioning, management, and guaranteed performance of virtual desktops on a large scale. As a result, Sychron is more of a management and front play in the VDI space that integrates with back-end hypervisors, most notably VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V, to manage the delivery of virtual desktops to users.

Not too long ago, even VMware engineers would recommend Sychron as a provisioning platform for large-scale virtual desktop deployments. Of course, much has changed in the past two years, with Citrix and VMware both upping the ante with significant investments in their own connection brokering and provisioning capabilities. Having tested both VMware VDI and Citrix XenDesktop, we sought to discover what OnDemand Desktop brings above and beyond what View 3 and XenDesktop provide out of the box. And most importantly, we sought to discover what business value OnDemand Desktop could provide to our fictional and geographically dispersed legal services firm, Bits and Bytes LLC.

The OnDemand Desktop portal installs on any server running Microsoft Internet Information Services 5,6, or 7, and back-ends to the OnDemand Control Center, which is the heart of Sychron's provisioning and automation engine. By creating what Sychron refers to as Habitats, administrators can associate a group of virtual desktop to a particular function, role, or Active Directory user group.

Of course, that's a basic capability that all connection brokers share. What really makes OnDemand Desktop Habitats useful is the way Sychron exposes certain metrics and benchmarks that can be used to tweak performance and the overall user experience. For example, to provide quick access for 20 sales employees to share a pool of 20 virtual desktops in Xen and VMware, the virtual desktop needs to be spun up and prepared for access, and that takes time and uses system resources.

Sychron Habitats take a different approach, allowing the administrator to define upper and lower boundaries of virtual desktops that are waiting on demand. In the lab, we created a habitat with a lower boundary of five virtual machines and an upper boundary of 25 VMs, which is the maximum number of desktops allowed to be spun up simultaneously in each Habitat. The OnDemand command center did a good job of dynamically managing load by spinning up more VMs as the lower boundary of active connections was approached, effectively keeping ahead of the demand curve to ensure quick access to virtual desktops for employees. If your user population is an impatient lot, then you'll appreciate the difference between waiting three seconds and 30 seconds for a desktop to load.As users log off for the day, OnDemand dynamically spins down virtual desktops and recovers system resources. Equally notable was Sychron's ability to ensure virtual desktop availability to VIPs in the event of low system resources or a broken cluster. Using a Habitat parameter that OnDemand refers to as a business priority field, administrators can ensure that, for example, the sales group is able to access virtual desktops ahead of the human resources team.

Another major benefit of OnDemand is its ability to easily build clusters with dissimilar hardware by simply adding the IP address of additional OnDemand portal servers that exist in the environment. Provisioning capabilities in OnDemand are on par with the other players in this Rolling Review. Master images can be easily updated to quickly deploy application updates and patches to Habitat members, while individual user profiles are managed and preserved separately from the master image. OnDemand does a good job of giving the administrator plenty of options for automatically timing out or logging out virtual desktop sessions when updates to the master image are ready to deploy.

While there's plenty to like about OnDemand, we pride ourselves on finding the gotchas. Mapping Active Directory groups or user roles to Habitats is not a point-and-click operation, but rather a process that requires tweaking an XML-like system file. And if you're looking to back-end your virtual desktops to Hyper-V, you'll need to run a separate OnDemand Command Center instance. Finally, if Citrix XenServer is your hypervisor of choice, you're out of luck because Sychron has no immediate plans to add support for Xen. On a positive note, Sychron does plan to address some of these shortcomings in a future release.

There's little doubt that OnDemand can add value to VDI implementations of any size. Large organizations that aren't happy with View 3's provisioning and brokering capabilities can purchase OnDemand Desktop as a replacement. However, the sell for smaller shops will be tougher. On average, a quad-core, dual-processor box with plenty of RAM should support up to 50 simultaneous virtual desktop sessions. And with the list price for OnDemand Desktop set at $1,000 per hypervisor core, compared with View 3's list price of $1,815 for the 10-pack Gold version of View 3 VDI, small to midsize enterprises could save a few bucks by replacing View 3 with OnDemand. Conversely, for short dollars more, you get View 3 and a licensed version of ESX along with support from VMware, which is huge for companies of all sizes, but particularly for small shops that can't afford a dedicated virtualization engineer to oversee the environment.

Our take is that OnDemand is a worthwhile investment from a provisioning and resource management perspective, but it's not a killer app that all VDI users must have. The brokering and provisioning capabilities of View 3 and XenDesktop are extremely comparable, with the exception of a few uniquely implemented OnDemand Habitat features. Finally, an update on the players in this Rolling Review. Stoneware has opted out, as the company is now focusing on cloud computing. Joining the fray are Ericom Software and Leostream.

Our Take

Sychron Ondemand Desktop