Enterprise to PC: You're dead to me

You'd think the PC was dead. One of the busiest sessions at Gartner Inc.'s IT Expo Monday was a Citrix case study presentation on desktop virtualization. The 150-seat venue  packed them in so tightly that show organizers had to turn an overflow crowd away. Desktop virtualization is also top of mind with Gartner's clients. "Eighty percent of my calls [from clients] are about this topic," says analyst Mark Margevicius.

A fundamental change is under way, he says. "Our clients tell us that [the PC] is no longer a strategic platform of choice." Is the PC dead? Not by a longshot. But virtualization could slowly pull away pieces of it -- and transform the PC from a hardware and software stack on the desktop to content delivered as a service.

IT is fed up with desktops, which are an endless source of security and management headaches. With virtualization, administrators think they may finally have viable alternatives to the standalone PC for the masses. One of the most promising technologies: Hosted virtual desktops that combine a standard image that runs on an easily administered back-end server with a separately delivered personalization layer that may include the user's custom settings, data -- even personal applications. A lack of personalization was a key reason why many business users rejected server-based computing technologies such as Presentation Server (now XenApp). That product is often limited to areas such as call centers, where locked down PCs are accepted practice. For general business users, however, a locked down PC compromises usability.

With hosted virtual desktops, "It's the same experience to the user. The transition of moving from traditional PC to a virtual one is transparent," Margevicius says.

Paul Roche, CIO at distributor Network Service Company, deployed hosted virtual desktops to 100 users using XenDesktop, XenApp and other products from Citrix. Everyone has their own custom desktop and custom applications loaded. "It's hard to tell people you have to go from that to a locked down desktop. That was an unsurmountable task to go from the wild west to complete lock down," he says. Personalized hosted desktops solved that issue.

Other factors are at play as well. Intel will give desktop virtualization a boost when it delivers PC motherboards in the first quarter of 2010 that include its hardware-level Virtualization Technology hypervisor. Machines will come from Dell or HP already preconfigured for a Citrix or VMware or other environments -- and will run faster. Similarly, virtual appliances will evolve that move more applications, such as disk encryption, outside of the operating system environment. "Why embed it in the operating system when it should be part of the platform," Margevicius says. Removing features like this will make Windows more stable. "If the operating system does less, Windows works better, and that's a good thing."

So what's holding IT back? The inertia of 25 years of having a PC on every desktop, for one thing. But there are other issues as well. Most notably, the personalization capabilities for hosted virtual desktops aren't fully baked. Bob, an IT director I spoke to at the event, has more than 100 machines in pilot. They work fine for most of the users, but strange things do happen: Things that should persist sometimes don't. The executive says he's had issues in his Citrix XenDesktop environment such as desktop icons that don't stay where you put them and problems with Acrobat crashing. Both problems were resolved, he told me, but the process is time consuming. There are many nuances, he says, and the learning curve is lengthy. Margevicius says the tools need more time to mature.

Another issue: The capabilities don't work in offline mode. Margevicius says he doesn't expect vendors to start rolling out portable hosted virtual desktop capability until at least 2012.

Hosted virtual desktop offerings are also very proprietary, which means accepting a certain level of inflexibility and vendor lock-in. There are no common platforms, no common APIs. The proprietary nature of the technology even extends to the new hardware-layer hypervisors. While Intel has enabled the feature to be open, system vendors will use it to embed proprietary implementations of virtualization hypervisors onto the bare metal. So a machine delivered to run as a VMware client won't run in a Citrix environment, and vice versa.

Cost is another major factor. While pay back is there, there's an up front capital cost that can give companies sticker shock, especially at a time when preservation of capital is a priority. The project is about more than PC replacement: It involves an infrastructure build out in the data center. "Everything you do on the back end is net new," Margevicius says. That includes servers, storage and perhaps additional network bandwidth and redundancy.

Then there's licensing, the unforeseen gotcha, which is where Roche got stung. He and his staff assumed that the Windows XP licenses for existing desktops would transfer over. They didn't. Those were OEM licenses. "We ended up to having to license Terminal Server client access licenses," he says.

But both Roche and Bob, the other IT executive I spoke with, are pleased with the results so far, despite the unexpected surprises and extended efforts to get the kinks worked out. Roche projects that XenDesktop will cost 58 percent less over 10 years than regular desktops and says his thin clients will go six to eight years between refreshes versus three to six for PCs. Bob would like to roll out hosted desktops to thousands of PCs company wide once he's sure the technology is mature and will scale.

Both say the savings are compelling, and others seem interested in following in their footsteps. By the end of 2012 Gartner expects that 60% of all enterprise desktop configurations will use virtualization technologies of one sort or another to deliver all or part of the Windows desktop to users.

Virtualization will split apart what users think of as the PC today and re-aggregate the pieces -- through hosted virtual desktops, server-based computing, application streaming and other techniques -- to deliver a complete PC experience. Margevicius calls that the "composite workspace."

Eventually, desktops may be delivered as just another service, and IT could get out of the PC hardware support business. That's Bob's goal. Departments can buy whatever client the want, he says, and IT will deliver the PC experience. But why stop there, Margevicius asks? Why not outsource service delivery? "You'll get out of the business of managing desktops."

Or perhaps not. Today most organizations say they can't envision ever not owning their PCs. But then again, says Margevicius, there was a time when organizations said they'd never outsource payroll.