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India moves to virtual desktops from servers

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Every enterprise today understands the need to be virtualized. However, many still hesitate to tread that last mile to become one. Until recently enterprises were wary of letting an external tool pry over their physical as well as virtual machines and considered virtualization an 'easy-said-than-done' mode. Owing to this, a large segment of the addressable market is not yet tapped.

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However, is it just the security concerns that have been preventing this 'old technology' from becoming part of mainstream technology? The facts say a different story altogether because fundamental aspects of security remain the same for both physical and virtual machines.

Virtual desktops involve no local storage of user data, and therefore data security is effectively built into the architecture. So security concerns, though many more patches and vulnerabilities are to be addressed, alone cannot prevent this technology from gaining currency. An interesting fact is that not until recently did Apple allow its Macintosh OS to be virtualized!

Where do we lack?

Enterprises are today more than ever cashing in on this 'over a decade old technology'. However, the IT infrastructure management solutions have only recently caught up with its growth and this in turn paves way for an overall lack of IT maturity in India.

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For an organization to take up desktop virtualization, it should have an experience with server virtualization, so as to come in terms with the latter's requirements. They should have a detailed assessment of the existing infrastructure and objectives (which calls for a lot of time and money), and implementation of a number of tools that facilitate streamlined management of the virtual environment. 

Somak Roy, managing analyst, Butler Group, says: “Organizations with such level of IT maturity are rare in India, outside the IT/ITES and BFSI sectors. However, with the growth of domestic IT outsourcing the benefits of server and endpoint virtualization would be increasingly accessible to the average Indian company as well.”

Thus, there is a huge gap in terms of skill at the strategic and technical level. Organizations are still stuck at the basic level of what, where and how. On the other hand, those who have taken the first steps had to back out soon because 'graphics-heavy applications do not perform well with virtual desktop'. 

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“IT needs to have a big enough profile for management to think of a fundamentally different way of running the data centre and possibly end-user computing. A lot of testing time is required and related technologies such as back-up software need to be implemented. However, that’s still not the situation in most companies in India across non IT-intensive sectors. The current economic environment offers a serious enough incentive to make the necessary investments to achieve lower operational costs in the long run,” Somak adds.

Overall, virtualization implementation is a time-consuming activity, and the typically understaffed Indian IT organization can rarely take time off from managing day-to-day operations.

 
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“Moreover, there is still a lack of clarity on what are the licensing implications of a dynamic environment; where application and OS instances can be processed across many physical servers,” he observes.

“For desktop virtualization, the lack of support for peripherals, such as removable storage media and printers, and lack of user customizability, has limited the scope of deployment to segments where requirements are standardized and do not vary significantly with time.”

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Of late, thin client vendors such as Wyse have expanded options in the peripheral support area. Also, key desktop virtualization vendors such as VMware are expanding support for user customization and device support.

The need to be Virtualized

Unlike before, India is today slowly emerging out of its uncertainties and is more than ever trying to be virtualization ready. This is more so because the ease with which a new server, with a given configuration, can be provisioned makes the IT organization more aligned with the demands of business, and specifically to application usage requirements that vary considerably across time and cannot be accurately predicted. Importantly, for testing and development requirements, servers with specific configurations can be provisioned easily.

Desktop Virtualization is rising in demand owing to various reasons, says Somak, such as:

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Reducing end point hardware costs: Such as in a call center, where the application requirements are undifferentiated across large population of employees, and instead of a full blown desktop, a desktop environment can be 'beamed' from a server-hosted virtual machine.

Call centre employees require a standardized set of applications and settings. Therefore, an expensive desktop hardware could be replaced with 'thin clients'. Thin clients are much less expensive than traditional desktops to acquire and maintain.

Enhancing security: There are scenarios where centrally managing data is important, because of the sensitive nature of the data. This is true for call centre employees and also true for high value employees such as traders. Data is centrally managed from the server and no data is stored in the end-point hardware.

Convenience for the user or the administrator: Where multiple 'application environments', applications, or desktop environments might be required, which could be mutually incompatible. This requirement has a number of possible scenarios. For example, consider a company that is upgrading to Vista. While Vista offers a number of benefits to the company, certain applications support only XP.

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