COMPUTING TRENDS
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
SINGAPORE : Virtualisation is no longer just about servers but is coming to a desktop near you, according to Wes Wasson, chief strategy officer at Citrix.
In May this year, Citrix released XenDesktop to provide a fully virtualised desktop environment, and the company is working with companies such as HP and Wyse to provide a new breed of video and keyboard unit.
Traditional blade PCs - which have the PCs running on blades in the data centre - have failed to catch on and are really only used in the financial services sector or in high-end engineering and manufacturing situations that demand a lot of processing power.
The problem with early virtual desktops was that while they worked with standard office applications, they fell apart when flexibility was needed in terms of graphics and multimedia. XenDesktop addresses this and provides what Wasson describes as a rich, personalisable desktop that can run anything from iTunes to 3D graphics and VoIP.
He also disagreed with the vision that all apps are headed to the browser and that soon we will be running everything via a browser on a thin client on a variety of operating systems. At least not anytime soon, he reckons.
Asked about the competition, EMC's VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V, the chief strategy officer said that EMC can be viewed as direct competition in the server space, but not in the desktop arena.
"EMC sees virtualisation as the end goal. Citrix sees virtualisation as a powerful technology enabler. The real goal is for IT to virtualise everything as quickly as possible (to provide flexibility and agility)," he said.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is a partner, and Citrix works very closely with Redmond, having a development centre there.
In fact, for every dollar that takes in Citrix sales, it is estimated that Microsoft receive 75 cents.
Today, one of the leading drivers in virtualisation is the green aspect. The benefits of consolidating and virtualising servers is clear, with an average replacement ratio of 10 separate old servers to one new consolidated virtualised server.
On the desktop side, a traditional desktop PC takes 300 watts to run and emits 800 BTU of heat an hour. With desktop virtualisation, the device in the office consumes as little 10 to 15 watts and while it is true that the desktop now runs in a virtual machine in the data centre, consuming power there instead, the savings are still in the realm of 40 percent overall.
This is because the virtual desktops are only created with up-to-date components and are turned on when the office worker flips the switch, with none of them sitting idly using power.
Wasson also sees Desktop virtualisation as a solution that will make everyone happy when the "new Millennials" enter the workforce. Young people are starting work who have grown up on their notebooks and Macbooks. The idea of forcing them to use a boring, run-of-the mill corporate PC is very foreign to them. By using desktop virtualisation, a worker can continue to use his MacBook with the Windows-only corporate application running away on a virtual desktop in the data centre.
Before, not only would the IT department have to find a Mac client, but they would have to maintain and look after it too.
Today, virtual desktops run an image in the data centre with the images and inputs travelling over the wire. Wasson says that in the future, a new form of virtualisation might see the entire operating system being streamed over to run on the end device in real-time while maintaining control.
Going forward, Wasson sees software playing a more important role with closer intimacy between the virtualisation software and hardware. The Xen Hypervisor, the core of Citrix's products already has features in it that take advantage of chips that will not ship until 2009 or 2010. Many of Intel's engineers contribute code to the open source XenSource community.
The Xen Hypervisor is the small 50,000 line virtualiastion engine core that is open source. Last October, Citrix purchased XenSource and has put in a formal board structure that keeps the key contributors - IBM, HP, Intel and of course, Citrix - and handed over control of the open source project to the a new organisation, Xen.org.
The difference between Xen and other open source projects is that the number of software engineers who understand and can write the advanced code needed for hypervisors numbers in the hundreds, and many of them work full time at Intel as chip designers, for instance.
The other key difference is that the Xen hypervisor is not a complete product that can be used - Citrix uses it to power its virtualisation, Amazon uses it to power its cloud computing projects and Google uses it as the engine behind Google Apps.
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