As you all know, the buzzword in campus computing for the past couple of years has been “Virtualization“. Of course, like everything else, there are many implementations of this – server virtualization, storage virtualization, database virtualization, network virtualization and desktop virtualization to name a few. When I talk about desktop virtualization, which the most relevant to the end users, the easiest explanation that I have been able to offer is how computing used to be in the mainframe world. Thus, the Deja Vu. Of course, it goes without saying that I can’t use this indiscriminately on all end users because some of you are not old enough to know what this means!
At Pace, we have done a wonderful job in virtualizing a lot of backend servers and services. In simple terms, what this means is that using software, you can make a single physical machine appear to the users as though it is multiple machines. For example, we may have a single physical server where we may have one virtual server running as web server, another to do Email etc. One could argue that is it not true that each of these services is a software program and therefore you could anyway run them simultaneously on the same machine? You theoretically can, but if the Email program is stuck and you want to restart the machine, every single service on that machine needs to be restarted! In the virtual scenario, since each virtual server is basically a separate server, you can deal with them separately. This is just one advantage. There are many others – their memory and disk allocations are handled as though they are completely separate (in the case of disk, it is possible to share across the machine, if needed).
This is an extremely powerful way to take advantage of the every increasing power of the computers and reduce the hardware footprint, saving money as well as energy. We have virtualized so many services at this point and are constantly looking for ways to do more! It is a good thing.
Now, we have begun looking at the desktop virtualization. This simply means that your virtual computer is running on a server and you access it either from what is called a thin client (a $200-$300 device), or another computer of yours using the remote desktop application. The computer resource center in Willcox Hall has 18 thin clients (the device that acts as the go between your monitor, keyboard and the mouse and the remote virtual desktop) that has been running for over 3 weeks. The thin clients are very much like the Dumb Terminals of the Mainframe era, except now they have a lot of intelligence built on them!
I access my Windows 7 and a Windows XP desktop on the virtual server remotely from my Mac! It performs so well that I no longer use the VMWare Fusion on my Mac that provided me access to all Windows applications that I needed.
Overall, this is a direction that we want to move for various reasons. The amortized cost of the thin clients are far cheaper (they can last 5-6 years minimum). If one of these devices breaks, a technician simply swaps it for a new one and you are done! Not true when your desktop fails today. In addition, the management of various images of operating systems is maintained centrally and the management is far superior than managing literally hundreds of copies of the operating system across the University. Also, we can easily maintain multiple operating system images (try configuring your PC to run both Windows 7 and Windows XP!) when we are rolling out new operating systems so people can switch back and forth while testing the new system. The personnel resources needed to maintain such an environment is far less than the current situation. This solution does require investments in licenses and server hardware and disks, but overall, we are convinced that the return on investment is justified.
Finally, all the user data remains on the server and is backed up, and therefore more secure than if it is on one’s laptop or even desktop. I can provide a lot more reasons why the virtualized desktop environment has the best return on investment while not compromising the user experience. But I will stop with this!
Of course, there are limitations – certain applications that are graphics or multimedia heavy will not work on this. Those that are privacy proponents may not agree to leave all their personal data on a server! Since everything is on the server, any service disruptions of the server of disk storage would mean you cannot get to your machine. We are spending a lot of time and effort to therefore design the back end with full redundancy.
So, we will carefully examine where this model is appropriate in the case of administrative staff and faculty before we go too far with it. Many of our users are highly mobile, going from one campus to another and believe me, this will simplify their life immensely. Skeptics of technology would say that all claims I have made about the virtues of virtualization remind them of the justifications that the techies made about moving away from the mainframe to client-server model and therefore this whole argument is also Deja Vu All over Again! It is so true…