Desktop Virtualisation – Worth The Cost?

The management benefits are the clearest part: While as a rule of thumb one administrator can look after around 100 PCs – perhaps more given today’s remote management products, Craig is a Sun veteran, where around 36,000 thin clients were managed by five staff.

And using less power is now more important with organisations under pressure to reduce their carbon footprint. A PC uses around 160W not including the screen. This can be almost done away with, for a small increase in server power.

Unexpected benefits: cleaning up IT

Alongside these benefits, thin clients can also help in the general process of tidying IT up and reducing complexity. Both men pointed to the way thin clients centralise the applications actually being used, making it possible to manage licences – so licensed software doesn’t sit unused and forgotten on PCs.

It can also help filter out non-business applications and reduce the wasted storage for unread documents on PCs. “Users have thousands of documents, and when you ask how many they want to migrate across to the new image, the answer is always ‘all of them’.” said Craig. “When you probe a little deeper, you find that many of these documents haven’t been touched for three years or more, so you can start to whittle that down.”

Another spin-off is peace and quiet and a tidier desk. People rarely complain about the noise of their desktop systems, but when they go the office becomes quieter, especially in a classroom situation. Similarly, replacing a desktop box with a small unit the size of a video cassette makes a desk look tidier.

Watch storage costs and keep the experience good

So how do you start moving? The first thing is to classify users into power users, office users and “task users” such as those in warehouses. Each needs to be given applications and performance level that is at least as good as they currently have, or else they will complain, said Puttick.

That doesn’t mean giving everyone the equivalent of a full PC, as many features are unused. However, CIOs should carefully think whether they offer USB connections. Many staff expect to be able to plug in their cameras and download holiday snaps for the family on the work computer – IT staff may disapprove, but preventing this might provoke a rebellion.

The biggest barrier is users’ possessiveness towards their PCs, said Craig: “The biggest human objection is ‘It’s my PC’.”

Despite the panel’s insistence that costs would be lower, the audience flagged investment as a major barrier to implementing virtual desktops, with one listener from a Fortune 100 pointing to the difficulty of providing enough storage: “You have to be VERY careful managing images with data deduplication, profile management etc, to get the costs down to similar to a desktop.”

The panel agreed, pointing out that desktop virtualisation requires images of all the desktops in the organisation, to be stored centrally, perhaps at three or four Gb per desktop.

So the other major piece of advice, then, is to make sure your IT infrastructure is up to it. If you haven’t got a storage system that can deal with the VDI demands efficiently, then you may get little immediate benefit from virtualising your desktop, the panel concluded.