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I had dinner with a friend who’s been writing some documentation for his companies projects to implement blade workstations, and desktop virtualization, as we had dinner, I took the opportunity to quiz him about them and this is the result:

What blades will you look at?

Well we’re going to test the HP and the IBM blade workstations, we’ve been playing the ClearCube ones they’re very good, but we have a purchasing agreement with HP, so that can sometimes sway things, we’ll be selecting blades with typically 2x Xeon processors, 4GB RAM and a 60GB disk, we’ll need to be able to drive at least two monitors up to four.

How are you going to virtualize the desktop?

We were thinking of either Citrix and Ardence where we might have a boot image which the client loads and runs against, or a VMWare virtualized desktop session, we’ll be trying both, I was thinking something like a DL585 as the hardware, SAN boot, SAN storage for the images, the main objective I’ve got is reducing the desktop disk size, we’re buying pcs with 80GB drives these days, we only need XP and bank applications so we’re looking to half that.

I remain a big fan from the centralization part, but I do wonder about the cost element, how have you found it?

Well have you thought about the desktop networking side? All the switches and routers I need in order to provide and maintain a production desktop network? When I virtualize the desktop everything’s on the central core – everything’s at the server side and basically you’re just talking to it, the network infrastructure between the client and the server gets simplified, that’s a hidden benefit.

On the support angle, it’s the general virtualization benefits, and the ability when a user complains that their desktop is slow, to take a pre-built image, point them at that, have them log in, they’ll pick up their applications/settings and start working on a new pc. Doing that in the physical world is expensive.

Do the traders actually need a blade workstation?

Not all of them did, but what we offer internally is a kind of Big Mac meal choice, you’re either a high performance user, or a standard user, standard users get a thin client that can handle one monitor, has a few usb ports and runs on our virtual infrastructure, it’s say £750 a year including support and the thin client. For the power user, you pay double that for the ‘instance’ the blade workstation, and you buy the monitors you need. The blade is dedicated to you, we have a few hot swap ones, and anyone can have it, they just need sign off. We’re anticipating that most people outside the trader arena will cope with the standard user option.

We’re opting for either blade or virtual to keep life simple, there should be a half way but we discussed it and wanted to keep it simple, we can offer more memory/disk on the blade pc or the standard option if needed.

How much do you think you’ll save?

Well I have to be careful what I say hear, but let’s just say that it’s a significant cost, the desktop support hardware costs should fall, the actual desktop support calls should also fall as we are able to better control the environment, coupled with the energy efficiency of the thin clients and the blade pcs, we can centrally control them, have the virtual instances paused overnight?

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