Virtualization – Page 39

Is The Future VDI + Employee Owned Laptops?

October 8, 2008 1 Comment

A few weeks ago I was casually talking with one of my enterprise clients about VDI. This client has a few VDI enabled desktops in their enterprise primarily for users who demand high powered systems for computationally intense work (it was cheaper for the company to invest in a small VDI infrastructure with powerful servers for these users than buying true high end desktops…especially since this customer makes the powerful servers themselves). My client mentioned how maybe he’ll just buy a MacBook Pro himself (a laptop he hasn’t been able to convince his employer to buy for him) and run his desktop as another VDI instance.

This is where I shot the conversation off on a tangent to talk about a friend of mine who was interviewing at a startup that expected him to buy his own laptop. The surprising thing about the startup was that they just expected him to already own a laptop that he would be willing to use for work purposes. I commented on how the future may be allowing employees to use what ever laptop they want for the work computer and the employer will just provide everyone a VDI desktop for use as their “corporate desktop”. This definitely eases the administration, security, and hardware refresh burden for the company. One would just expect some sort of stipend for the employee to go toward a personal laptop computer. (I’m purposely leaving the hardware support issue out of the conversation, but with Apple Stores proliferating this could be the outsourced hardware support for my MacBook craving client.)

So I was surprise this week when I received my latest copy of CIO magazine and found an article asking Is It Time For Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs? Some analysts are saying that this is the next logical step in consumerization of IT, especially when you see how many non-approved smart phones, or laptops are already finding their way into corporate workplace (I’ve done this myself with my previous employeer…but that’s another story). Why fight the trend? With VDI, IT Executives can make their end users happy by letting them use whatever hardware they like, install any applications they want on the hardware (they own it, and there is only one application on the hardware that IT cares about…the VDI client). They can make their finance people happy by reducing the endless cycle of desktop hardware refreshes by using VDI to run the desktops on server hardware and use VDI to scale user’s CPU and Memory “power” as needed by the users business workload. They can also keep the security people happy by providing a locked down environment that lives in the data center.

I can see this being a total desktop solution that more and more companies will start implementing in the near future.

Let’s just hope that the hardware stipends are reasonable…

Building a Low Cost ESX Server

October 2, 2008 Leave a Comment

About a month ago I had a friend contact me asking about some issues he had while buidling a low cost ESX server for his home lab. He was having difficulty with regards to one small piece of hardware, and he didn’t know about the hardware compatibility list for ESX. While it’s a bit late for my friend Dave, here is some great instructions on how to build a $500 ESX Server. Also check out the VM Help site for an unofficial whitebox HCL list; this is not hardware offially supported by VMware but apparently tested by the internet VMware community…your milage may vary.

Server Consolidation and VM Sprawl

October 2, 2008 Leave a Comment

Today I came across Mike DiPetrillo’s article on Virtual Server Sprawl and found it very reminiscent of issues that I see in my enterprise customers while they are undergoing server consolidation. Virtualization is almost always part of any server consolidation effort today. Yet, there are some companies who, for various reasons, do not think about virtualization during consolidation…they think of it after consolidation. While virtualization during consolidation takes more effort and planning than consolidation alone, there ends up being more waste in time, resources, and capital when virtualization is done after. Unless you’re undergoing a huge enterprise wide consolidation or consolidation of Tier 1 applications, think consolidation and virtualization together.

When you do think about both, make sure that you take into consideration the cultural or social changes in your organization that virtualization may make. If your pulling developers systems out from under their desk and giving them VMs, there will be some resistance just because they feel like they are loosing something.

But, once the benefits of virtualization is discovered, make sure you don’t short change yourself on two fronts:

Storage: Many an IT manager has short changed themselves on storage during a virtualization effort. Either by purchasing lower grade storage that costs less at the expense of performance or by not buying enough storage. With all the VMs running off of a shared storage device performance needs to be kept in the forefront of your planning. Also, once the users start to realize the benefits of virtualization the potential for VM sprawl starts as does the depletion of your storage.
Workflow: One of the often overlooked areas of a virtualization deployment is the process and workflow around requesting and authorizing new VMs. This is what leads to VM sprawl and quickly depleted resources. This is also exactly where VMware Lifecycle Manager (LCM) comes into play. You need to think about how groups will request new VMs and the authorization process needed to approve them. LCM will help with all that.

Just a few items to keep in mind while planning a consolidation or a virtualization effort.