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PCWorld

Organizations are finding it hard to calculate the cost benefits of desktop virtualization and broad adoption is unlikely to happen for another year or two, VMware’s CEO said on Wednesday.

Interest in the technology is high, and companies with a strong focus on security and regulatory compliance, such as financial services companies, are adopting it quickly, VMware CEO Paul Maritz said during the company’s quarterly conference call Wednesday.

But for other organizations the benefits aren’t so clear. Many companies don’t know how much they spend to manage their standard, physical desktops, making it hard to calculate the return on investment for a virtual system, he said.

“A lot of companies frankly don’t have a good handle on what the baseline is — they can’t tell you what it costs to provision a desktop today. So we need to work with them and develop the ROI models and we need a bit more history to make those models have credibility,” he said.

The challenge is not only one of cost but importantly of support and skill set/comfort zone – that in essence, everyone understands the desktop/laptop. As we move on to a virtual infrastructure, the management and support can get more complex, particularly as we start linking applications to group policy, coupled with a more centralized approach to application packaging and delivery.

We need to step back for a second from the debate of should I/shouldn’t I, and highlight that the challenge, the issues surrounding desktop support are typically (like server) as a result of a lack of investment, poor organization/delivery and inflexibility with the technologies/process.  The prime example I use is the manufacturer I met a few weeks ago, if you log a call to get a pc rebuilt, it takes three days, why? The engineer has to re-install Windows using Altiris, but the packages, the applications are all a manual install, the more applications you have, the longer it takes him to map the drive, run setup and configure it. Deploying a virtual pc in this scenario wouldn’t necessarily resolve the issue.

We need to transform the way we offer the desktop to one of lowest operating cost, one of pure delivery and an end to debates and billing. A move on to the disposable desktop whether it’s virtual or physical – we have to examine the marginal cost of the transaction which can be unpopular and requires business backing. For example John’s P4 1.7Ghz desktop fails and needs a new hard drive, we can order a new hard drive, but from an operational standpoint, in support and from a power standpoint, it’s cheaper long term to replace it. Why pay two man days £600 or so for an engineer to fit a £40 hard drive, install Windows then the applications and hand back to the user, when thanks to a purchasing agreement you can buy a desktop for £400?

Going towards a virtual desktop therefore requires a core question answered:

• What is it we need the desktop for
• How many applications can we take off the desktop and move to Citrix/Web or Excel/Grid/Inhouse application?
• In essence – does everyone need a desktop, a virtual Windows session or a web browser with a citrix client.

The best example I can use for this was the multinational that was discussing migrating all their applications to Citrix/web and having users bring in their own laptops on the basis that they saved:

• Buying a pc and providing corporate desktop support -you need the Citrix client and a browser
• No software licenses for the client pc, virus software, Windows, Office etc.

They were aiming to make the pc irrelevant – Outlook was online, Office was run using Citrix and all the users documents/files were saved and managed centrally on their servers – the pc was a connection device, nothing more.

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