Making the move to a virtual desktop infrastructure

Today’s businesses are operating during a time of unprecedented pressures. In addition to facing economic pressures, they have found that their IT environments have become increasingly complex and therefore pose significant management challenges. Specifically, the use of PCs has spread like wildfire within and across organisations in the last 20 years. However, as a concept, PCs were not designed to be used in a widespread enterprise environment. As a result they have become difficult to manage, maintain and back up.

On top of this, the number of servers running different applications is increasing, all of which creates higher administration and maintenance needs, under utilised server resources, high power costs, less flexibility and increased hardware and software costs.

Compounding the pressure even further, most recently, IT departments have become the targets for businesses keen to cut costs and become more environmentally friendly by reducing power consumption and lowering the carbon footprint of the organisation. All of these challenges have left the strained IT department seeking new ways to address these issues within budget and without additional resources. However, virtual desktop infrastructures are emerging as a solution to many of these challenges.

What is VDI?

A virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, is based on hardware or operating system virtualisation which extends their features and benefits to desktop PCs. Under this model, businesses adopting a VDI replace their traditional PCs with virtual desktops and the operating system and applications which would normally run on each PC are centrally provisioned on servers. As the operating system, programmes or data are not stored on the desktop PC, there is no longer a need for a powerful desktop computer. Instead an old machine or cheap thin client machine can be used to access the virtual desktop. The virtual desktop looks and feels the same to the end user, but with it residing on a central server, the cost of running and managing it is significantly reduced for the business. In addition, security is enhanced because content is held on centralised servers. This allows businesses to have more control over what users can and can’t do which adds an extra layer of protection to the company’s security policy. Security is also improved from having a centrally managed solution. Instead of having to struggle to deploy updates and patches to each individual PC spread throughout the organisation, using a VDI model means that updates and patches only need to be deployed on the central servers, saving time and significantly lowering security risk.

How can a virtual desktop infrastructure help?

By choosing to virtualise the operating system instead of the hardware when adopting VDI, businesses can increase the ratio of desktops-per-server which results in lower overhead and greater efficiency because all the desktops run the same operating system.

Needing fewer physical servers also means that the management and maintenance burden is reduced as all desktop resources and data are centrally controlled, while the budget required for buying new physical servers can be lowered. In addition, consolidating the number of physical servers needed results in better utilisation, deployment is easier and security is increased as there are less machines to keep patched. New desktop applications can be implemented with minimum development, testing, migration and man-hours, making the process much faster than with traditional client-server models.

Employees and the business can also benefit from flexible working as the virtual desktop can be accessed anywhere at any time, which makes it ideal for organisations with a mobile workforce.

Green benefits of VDI

In addition to the benefits above, using a VDI can also help businesses address their green IT goals. Implementing a VDI based on operating system virtualisation, rather than a hypervisor, allows organisations to get three times the number of virtual servers on each physical device, enabling significant power savings to be achieved because fewer physical servers are needed. In fact, on a typical server using Parallels Virtuozzo Containers you can get up to 150 virtual desktops. 

Power usage is also reduced because using PCs as thin clients which don’t store or process applications or data lowers the amount of electricity that each PC uses. This not only reduces the carbon footprint of the organisation but can cut costs too. This is illustrated in the table below.

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According to the above calculation, based on a business with 1,000 users, using a VDI model with Parallel’s Virtuozzo Containers can reduce energy consumption by 71% compared to a business with traditional power hungry desktop PCs.

The green benefits, together with the general benefits of VDI, make it an ideal choice for businesses looking to reduce power consumption and lower their carbon footprint while cutting costs and creating an environment that is easier to manage and maintain.

How Parallels powers VDI

In addition to a virtualisation solution like Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, a VDI consists of servers, thin clients and the connection broker, which manages the connections of users to the virtual desktops.

Parallels partners with Quest Software to jointly offer the Provision Network Virtual Access Suite to customers looking for a seamless and cost-effective VDI solution that offers higher scalability, security, isolation, rapid provisioning and high-availability. The jointly marketed bundle of Parallels – Quest Software VDI solution brings the greenest desktop computing architecture to market and offers higher Return on Investment (ROI) and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than any other virtualised desktop infrastructure.

This solution delivers:

• Most desktops per server – three times more than VMware or Citrix
• Lowest cost storage – only one copy of OS and applications per server
• Global updates and patch management
• The ability to dynamically modify desktops resources and capabilities in seconds
• Fast provisioning of desktop and applications
• £500,000 of cost saving over other VDI solutions for every 1,000 virtual desktops deployed