ESG sees a giant opportunity for companies to help match users with technology, choose the ideal desktop virtualization delivery model (BTW it won’t always be VDI), choose the technology vendor(s), and then monitor the results (which include the end-user experience). Companies such as Liquidware Labs have already established a relationship with Dell Services to help address this exact scenario. These companies also see the value of being engaged early in the game and continuing to provide value as users transition and desktop virtualization becomes embraced by end-users and IT operations.

Tactical VDI deployments should not be considered successful desktop virtualization implementations. It takes a clear understanding of the current end-user community, their jobs and responsibilities, application usage, endpoint choices, and the right technology to successfully build desktop virtualization into your company’s desktop strategy.

Here is a snippet from the Lab Validation that walks through the methodology:

A Mixed Real-world Storage Benchmark Methodology

While VMmark is well suited for understanding the performance of a mix of applications running on a single server, it was not designed to assess what happens when a mix of applications is run on multiple servers sharing a single storage system. VMmark tends to stress server internals more than it does the storage system. The methodology presented in the balance of this report was designed to stress the storage system more than the servers. Taking a cue from the VMmark methodology, a tile-based concept was used. As shown in Figure 5, each tile is composed of a mixture of four application workloads. Two physical servers, each configured with eight virtual machines, were used to measure performance as the number of active tiles was increased from one to four.

Figure 5. ESG Lab Tile-Based Storage Benchmarking

The difference between the server-focused VMmark benchmarking and storage-focused ESG Lab benchmarking is shown in Figure 6. Note how VMmark testing is performed with a single server, often attached to multiple storage systems. As a matter of fact, the IBM BladeCenter HS22 VMmark results presented earlier in this report were achieved with a pair of IBM System Storage DS4700 arrays. In other words, when vendors publish VMmark results, they make sure there is plenty of storage available so they can record the highest VMmark server score. This provides IT managers with a fair comparison of the performance capabilities of competitive server technologies.

ESG Lab storage-focused benchmarking uses a different approach. Instead of testing with a single server and more than enough storage, multiple servers are attached to a single storage system. Rather than running application level benchmarks which stress the CPU and memory of the server, lower level industry standard benchmarks are used with a goal of measuring the maximum mixed workload capabilities of a single storage system.

Figure 6. Server-focused VMmark vs. Storage-focused ESG Lab Benchmarking

Mixed Workloads

Industry standard benchmarks were used to emulate the IO activity of four common business application workloads:

• E-Mail: The Microsoft Jetstress utility was used to generate e-mail traffic. Similar to the Microsoft LoadSimm utility used in the VMmark benchmark, Jetstress simulates the activity of typical Microsoft Exchange users as they send and read e-mails, make appointments, and manage to-do lists. The Jetstress utility is however a more light-weight utility than LoadSimm. Using the underlying Jet Engine database, Jetstress was designed to focus on storage performance.
• Database: The Orion utility from Oracle was used to generate database traffic. Much like Jetstress, Orion is a lightweight tool that is ideally suited for measuring storage performance. Orion was designed to help administrators understand the performance capabilities of a storage system, either to uncover performance issues or to size a new database installation without having to create and run an Oracle database. Orion is typically used to measure two types of database activity: response-time sensitive online transaction processing (OLTP) and bandwidth sensitive online analytic processing (OLAP).
• Web Server: The industry standard Iometer utility was used to generate web server traffic. The IO definition was composed of random reads of various block sizes. The web server Iometer profile used for this test was originally distributed by Intel, the author of Iometer. Iometer has since become an open source project. Iometer tests were performed on Windows physical drives running over VMware raw mapped devices.
• Scan/read: The Iometer utility was used to generate a single stream of read traffic. Operations that tend to generate this type of large block sequential traffic include scan and index operations, long running data base queries, backup operations, bulk data uploads, and copies. One 256 KB sequential read workload was included in each tile to add a throughput intensive component to the predominantly random IO profile of interactive e-mail, database, and web server applications. As most experienced database and storage administrators have learned, a throughput intensive burst in IO traffic can drag down the performance for interactive applications, causing performance problems for end-users. Adding a few streams of throughput intensive scan/read traffic was used to determine whether interactive performance would remain predictably responsive as the amount of mixed IO utilization increased.

Each of the four workloads ran in parallel, with the Jetstress e-mail test taking the longest to complete (approximately three hours).

VMware in particular has been very successful in helping companies take existing x86 Windows and Linux workloads and consolidate/migrate them to an efficient platform that is simple to manage, improves application availability, and buys back IT’s time. Thus far, VMware’s success has primarily been with IT-owned and -managed applications along with a steady stream of maintenance/support renewals. There is still plenty of opportunity in this market, but VMware is being challenged by the likes of Microsoft with Hyper-V and Citrix with XenServer and by cloud providers like RackSpace and Oracle within their own stacks. The world it once ruled now has some company.

But fear not: VMware is on an acquisition tear to address the future of IT and specifically the future of application design and development. VMware CEO Paul Maritz also jumped up on stage during the day one keynote at Google I/O 2010 to show how VMware, with its acquisition of SpringSource, is laying down the accelerator pedal and looking to help steer application development design decisions for enterprise Java developers.

VMware will continue to help companies migrate existing applications to a virtualized platform and is bullishly positioning itself to be part of the roadmap for future application development. You may even imagine an environment where applications are written specifically to run on the “VMware OS.” But, before that happens, there are some key moves that will have to play out:

• VMware has to aggressively expand its community of users and technology partners beyond its existing base of IT operations-focused personnel.  Establishing momentum with application developers, DBAs, and CIOs will be critical to gaining popularity, establishing credibility, and qualifying for pole position. Its announcement with Google is a fantastic way to establish this.
• VMware has not made its business model with developers or the future state of application design 100% clear. On the server virtualization side, it is clear, but SpingSource and the other recent acquisitions muddy the waters. There is certainly an opportunity to arm service providers with out-of-the-box offerings that include messaging and, perhaps even more interesting, databases; how VMware is going to profit has not been laid out.
• The tide is beginning to rise as Microsoft amps up Azure to .NET developers and Oracle gains new enthusiasm with Java. VMware is putting itself right in the mix and has the potential to benefit from any shift in application design.

VMware’s success will also be dependent on its ability to help build a bridge between the IT operations and application teams. The two constituencies operated with very different goals and priorities–and VMware can position itself to be an influencer on both fronts. Essentially, VMware must show value on both sides.

It will be important to watch how VMware continues to make investments in the application space, internally balances two distinct objectives, and then goes to market.

• Desktop business grew 9% over last year to $264 million.
• XenDesktop contributed $32 million of recognized revenue, with trade-up products adding another $14 million to the deferred revenue balance.
• Four out of the five largest transactions across the company included XenDesktop.
• More than 10% of existing XenApp customers up for renewal in Q1 chose instead to trade up to XenDesktop.

As predicted, Citrix’s focus beyond VDI-only solutions, deep experience with application delivery, and proven networking solutions are accelerating Citrix’s momentum in the market. Microsoft’s blessing isn’t a bad thing to have, either. Brad Anderson called out Citrix as the preferred desktop virtualization solution in his keynote at MMS 2010. We will see what the impact is over the next two to three quarters as companies amp up their Windows 7 migrations.

A better long term desktop strategy involves the cloud. ESG published a research brief on this topic about a year ago. The brief analyzes the potential advantages of, as well as initial customer interest in, hosted desktop virtualization solutions and identifies the vendors that have an opportunity to capitalize on this emerging trend. From a business point of view, more than half of ESG research survey respondents indicated they would be amenable to a hosted virtual desktop solution.

For those of you following Microsoft, you also saw the announcement of Windows Intune at MMS 2010 and Brad Anderson incorporated desktops in the cloud into his keynote.

The primary attraction of the considering the cloud as part of a desktop management strategy will have to be favorable economics and uncompromised user experience. Some are going to argue the security of data, which is fine. Just architect your solution to host applications, OS, policies, and settings in the cloud and maintain the data in yourself. Basically strip off all the cumbersome tasks, shift the responsibility to a trusted provider, and focus on maintaining your data.

Some companies will choose to move entire desktop environments while others may just leverage the cloud for services like security and management. Regardless, the cloud will become part of desktop management strategies.

In my experience as a system administrator, I felt I was a pretty good administrator of systems, but that definitely did not mean I was a good manager of systems.  Sure, we had some point management tools in place, but for the most part, you ran over to the machine, logged in and fixed the problem …. hopefully before anyone noticed. We had aspirations to have better management functionality, but fires kept popping up and we never were able to dedicate resources to what were perceived as larger management problems. Instead, we carried on with the break/fix mentality.

That is quickly changing, primarily ignited by virtualization efforts inside the data center. As virtualization enters, it reinforces the importance of good management tools. As IT advances, management is essential to eliminate routine and mundane tasks, automate tasks, and have any hope of achieving IT as a service.

Microsoft’s maturity in management tools is aligning nicely as IT looks to implement new tools and processes into their environment. ESG’s research shows that operational efficiency is a higher priority than reducing capital expenses. Management tools need to be in place to enable change and control management, regulatory compliance, predictive analysis, and more efficient use of IT FTEs.

Here are some  highlights from MMS 2010:

• Virtual Machine Manager. VMM V-Next is aimed to help transition application owners to the virtual platform, enable IT self service, and incorporate external “cloud” resources.

• Operations Manager (OpsMgr). Monitoring for the modern data center that is composed of geographically distributed service environments requires visibility at all infrastructure layers and focuses on next generation applications. This also starts to pull in Azure.
• Hitachi announced deeper collaboration and partnership. OEM agreement for Windows Server 2008 R2, System Center, and SQL Server2008 technologies.

Next comes the fact that the majority of workloads that have migrated onto a virtual machine are IT-owned, low hanging fruit, minimal performance requirement applications. It has been easy for IT staffs to convince themselves of the value of server virtualization. Server virtualization has allowed them to perform maintenance during operating hours, saved them from having to make late night and weekend visits to the data center, improved service levels, and just plain increased morale inside IT. Thus far, the success of server virtualization has been truly phenomenal and has created heroes inside IT. Nice!

Now, IT shops that have made investments in virtualization and migrated the low hanging fruit are finding themselves screeching to a halt as they size up the next harvest of potential workloads that are ripe for the virtualized environment. There are many reasons this is happening, but one that keeps boiling to the top is the SAN. This is not to say that the SAN itself is the problem, rather the problem could be misconfiguration, lack of virtualization skills, inexperience with the technology, and poor planning. Not so nice!

As a result, guess who gets blamed? That’s right, the server virtualization providers: VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Parallels, Oracle. The majority of the time, it has nothing to do with the server virtualization solution, it is almost always a misconfigured environment. The bad news for these vendors is that they don’t want to ever be perceived as the bad guy in the stack, so they are finding themselves having to become SAN experts to support their customers. Crazy!

Here is an all-too-common true story:

IT sells the business on the value of server virtualization and calculates the ROI on the back of a napkin during a lunch meeting. They get the green light. Server virtualization is still a relatively new technology, but how hard can it be? And look at all these great things it does! IT begins by either sizing up the environment themselves, working with an integration partner, or subbing out the project so they can confidently get started off on the right foot. Some choose to do some type of virtualization assessment analysis (most do not) and they purchase some gear. The gear arrives and everyone has giant smiles on their faces as they rack and stack it into place. IT starts virtualizing print servers, file servers, and small custom applications and  are giddy with success to my point above. Confidence is high and they start to target the next tier of applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, and suddenly realize that the 7200RPM SATA drives they purchased to support their entire virtualization deployment may not cut the mustard. They fear that installing a VM running Exchange 2007 might be sluggish  based on the slower 7200RPM drives.  They reached back out to the original consultant that helped them launch the project and the consultants say that most of the read/writes will be done in cache mode and will be fine. Of course they do. What are they going to say? No, we screwed up and it won’t work!?!?

The fear is that they drop this new Microsoft Exchange VM in place and start having major performance issues. Their instincts are spot on and now they are faced with the challenge of how to migrate Exchange to the virtualized environment on their existing virtualization investment that has the compute horsepower and storage capacity available, but not the storage performance. Yikes! “Hey Mr. Bossman, you know that virtualization project you signed off on 6 months ago and all that new gear we just spun up? Well, looks like we may need some more because what we originally purchased really isn’t going to work for the Exchange migration you just tasked me with.”

As a result of all this and other similar scenarios, server virtualization deployments are stalling. While server virtualization has made giant strides over the past decade, persistent challenges related to application requirements, security, networking, infrastructure considerations, and organizational conflict are creating confusion–and inertia–for IT shops.  Both the percentage of virtualized workloads and virtual-machines-per-physical-server ratio remain disappointingly low.

There is a huge lack of virtualization skills and expertise that still needs to be found within IT and amongst the vendor ecosystem. Server virtualization is at risk of continued success if it can only reach the low hanging fruit.

Today, Microsoft announced plans to accelerate desktop virtualization and hit the market with a few good blows:

• If you are a VMware View customer with up to 500 licenses, Microsoft will allow you to trade them in.
• Somehow, Microsoft and Citrix have successfully learned to dance together and they are doing it again with a new technology agreement, combined solutions and go to market strategy.
• An improved licensing model will help justify investments and expand the number of client access devices users can access applications from.

What may have gone unnoticed was that this is all part of Microsoft’s desktop strategy, which includes things that were highlighted in today’s announcement (like VDI). There is a much bigger picture to keep in mind, though. Application virtualization, migration to Windows 7, user personalization, and offline desktop access are all key ingredients, as is the importance of desktop management across the different deployment models (physical or virtual).

The desktop virtualization market is still in its infancy and interest from customers is high. This news from Microsoft  should help bring some clarification to the table as businesses look at enforcing compliance and regulatory requirements, securing confidential data, simplifying IT management, and ultimately improving end user experience.

HP also jumped into the ring, announcing future support for Microsoft RemoteFX to enhance the user multimedia experience and released Remote Desktop Client (RDC) 7 add-on to lower the impact on IT resources and make efficient use of network resources.

Microsoft also hosted a Phil Donahue style event with executives from Microsoft and Citrix as well as a good customer panel. It’s worth jumping around the recordings if you are following the market or partnering with Microsoft at any level in the space.

Virtualization needs to happen in three places for success: Operating system, applications, and user. Once these three components are separated, life becomes much easier for IT and ultimately the end-user as well.

VMware recognized this a while back when it acquired Thinstall  in early 2008 and  RTO Software more recently. Both are good additions to add to its portfolio, giving VMware the ability to separate OS, applications, and user.

The announcement of ThinApp 4.5 is aimed at helping companies transition to Windows 7. More than 75% of enterprises refreshing their desktops will migrate to Windows 7 in the next 24 months and, to help ease this migration, will be looking at application virtualization as a way to migrate legacy applications to the new platform.

The question still remains if VMware will be able to bear the success it has had in the server virtualization market and parlay that onto the desktop. Quick innovation and technology development with ThinApp and View will help as will market awareness, education, and training.