Desktop virtualization: Making PCs manageable

12.09.2006

At Duncan Regional Hospital in Duncan, Okla., the number of desktops more than doubled to about 500 in the past two years. Rather than lobby for money to hire more desktop support techs, CIO Roger Neal decided to deploy ClearCube thin clients and keep the physical management in a central location -- and get more from his existing staff. When ClearCube began supporting VMware virtual machines in 2006, Neal began reconfiguring his blade servers to run three virtual machines per blade, so he wouldn't need more blades as the demand for desktops increased. He also saw desktop support calls drop by 40 percent, which he attributes to centralized PC management.

Streaming to the desktop

Virtualization at the application host server can make thin clients more efficient to deploy, but many organizations are wedded to having real PCs at users' disposal despite the support costs. Desktop streaming is emerging as one of the most efficient ways to support this model without incurring the usual bloated desktop support costs.

A growing number of vendors -- including Ardence, Propero, Stream Theory and Wyse -- offer desktop streaming software that provisions the entire desktop environment from a server to a desktop PC (or thin client).

Altiris, AppStream, and Microsoft (through its recent acquisition of Softricity) have pushed the concept to the next level, streaming applications rather then a complete desktop environment. This allows greater flexibility in what is provisioned, because IT can create a basic operating system image and then individual images for each application, and combine them as needed on the fly. You don't need a separate desktop image for each combination of applications.