Virtualisation: from server and desktop to the network

Momentum is gathering apace thanks to the cloud and a drive toward efficiency and security, as Brian J Dooley finds

By Brian J Dooley, Auckland | Wednesday, 10 March 2010
• Continued growth of cloud computing and movement toward seamlessly movement of workloads from on-premise to the cloud

• Evolution of desktop virtualisation, providing organisations with more options around deploying desktops

• Hardware-assisted virtualisation, so that the virtual layer can offload more work to hardware, providing greater efficiencies.

“Certainly, desktop virtualisation is opening up new ways of delivering desktops to users,” says Fox. “But what I think we’ll see is a blend of desktop delivery methods in an organisation based on user need rather than a one size fits all mandate from the IT department. What will be crucial for any desktop delivery project is that the environment must be well managed. “

Hardware, networking and storage are all critical components, but management is also critical. It has become so easy to provision virtualised systems that there now must be a real focus on managing the software.

Another issue of importance is security. “Security should be baked-in to every system, instead of an add-on,” says Fox. “The virtual platform needs to be designed for security from the ground up and using a secure development process. Virtualisation does not remove the requirement to provide security services into the virtual guests.”

Citrix has been involved with various areas of desktop virtualisation for the past 20 years, with its own thin client solutions and through recent acquisition of XenSource. “In recent years, there has been a lot more demand from users in flexibility, choice, and self service — as well as more challenges form the IT side,” says area vice president Peter Brockhoff. “IT departments want control, security and lower cost. Market demand is strong for effective solutions. The important thing is to pull together user demands and IT department demands, and deliver to both.”

From a desktop virtualisation perspective, one of the key issues is that different user types have very different requirements. “People are used to having a PC on the desk and this makes them accustomed to a level of performance,” says Brockhoff. “The virtualised solution needs to meet those expectations. Some users have simple requirements, such as just one or two applications. Others may have large requirements involving things like webcams and streaming video. We have solutions that meet these different needs and make it possible to tailor appropriate delivery types.”

In addition to the technology improvement, Brockhoff sees Microsoft’s rollout of Windows 7 as presenting a key opportunity for desktop virtualisation, because it is getting customers to think about desktops and how they are managed and deployed.

Gen-i is involved in implementing virtualisation solutions for its customers. According to ICT services manager Joe Bradley, the most important recent developments include increasing ability to apply virtualisation to diverse end-user environments, and ability to deploy mixed on-premise and cloud-based virtualised environments.

“Virtualisation for desktops is expected to have a significant impact on the market,” says Bradley. “It offers similar benefits to server virtualisation — such as standardisation, lower capital cost, centralised control - with improved methods for handling multiple operating environments and applications.”

AppSense provides IT management solutions focusing upon virtual environments. “As an organisation, we have been around for 14 years,” says ANZ general manager, Sean Walsh. The company began within the Citrix environment, but is now increasingly moving into other markets.

The AppSense management suite is modular software that provides diverse functionality for managing the virtual environment and ensuring the same look and feel on desktops no matter where they are accessed. AppSense provides mobile personalisation, as well as related technology such as security and licence management.

“Desktop virtualisation helps to reduce costs, while providing flexibility, and securing information,” says Walsh. “We bring user management. Frequently, companies haven’t thought of how to provision virtual desktops from a centralised environment. We can help with this and can also aid in areas such as rollout of Windows 7. Most companies will adopt a hybrid desktop model, with some physical and some virtual. We bring user management to all platforms, with centralised console management.”

Maxnet is a provider of business server hosting and connectivity solutions, and views virtualisation as an important part of the business. “Virtualisation enables service providers to better meet the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce that expects to be able to access their required applications and services anytime and anywhere at low cost,” says enterprise architect Jeremy Nees.

The first wave of virtualisation was based on cutting costs, consolidation of server environments and increased management efficiency. Another outcome was simplification of moving server workloads at the backend from one platform to another. This provides many potential benefits, though only a few have so far been realised.

The virtualisation concept is now being taken a step further. “Administrators are looking to migrate virtual machines across datacentres to cut running costs even further,” says Nees.

“For instance, compute demand could be moved according to where the cheapest power is available at a given period of time. So the second wave of virtualisation is about offering this kind of cost-saving, backend mobility without jeopardising the user’s quality of service. It offers service providers the ability to connect an increasingly mobile workforce to applications and services regardless of where the application or service resides or to where it may be moved.”

The next big step is network virtualisation, which will result in convergence of the network stack. “This will let different elements of the network be delivered down the same 10gbps Ethernet,” says Nees.

“This greatly simplifies administration of the network, and allows far greater automation which is required to deliver all that a cloud computing platform promises to offer. It enables end-to-end virtualisation, where all parts of the solution are virtualised, including load balancing, security and storage. So, no matter where any given pool of virtualised servers are migrated, the entire supporting network goes with them to ensure end users are still able to connect to the service that is being delivered from the virtual servers.”

An industry working party is also coordinating a common standard for virtualisation technologies, which will play an important part in ensuring the mobility of virtualised services across various virtualisation platforms. This should make it possible to migrate virtualised services at will from private clouds to public clouds, and from a VMware platform to Xen platform.

“We’ve built a ‘2N’ datacentre infrastructure, which basically means everything in the datacentre is duplicated so we can guarantee 99.99 percent uptime,” says Nees.