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The AppStream Blog
Stream of Consciousness
January 3, 2008
Managing Virtualization
-Brian Duckering, Senior Director of Products and Alliances, AppStream Inc.
Virtualization has once again become a very hot topic. You can hardly turn around without seeing another article on how virtualization is changing the face of IT, adding flexibility and/or reducing costs. And those that are paying attention have noticed that the concept of virtualization has grown way beyond server virtualization, a la VMware. Now there are virtual desktops and virtual applications as well. At each level, there are some fantastic and diverse value propositions that warrant at least as much hype as they are getting. However, as the popularity of these technologies grows, so is the concern about how to properly manage them.
Two areas of particular interest are managing applications in a virtual desktop environment, and managing virtual applications in any environment. In both cases flexibility and visibility, or lack thereof, are both blessing and curse. Traditional client management suites were never designed for these types of environments where a desktop or application is not necessarily associated day in and day out with the same piece of hardware. And even if we know where the application should be, the ability to actually identify or manage the application depends on its visibility on the relevant desktop, or the visibility of the desktop itself.
Virtual desktops are desktop environments that can come and go as needed, and are popping up everywhere. Most commonly virtual desktops are hosted and execute on a server somewhere and are accessed remotely, as with VMware’s VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) or HP’s CCI (Consolidated Client Infrastructure). But sometimes, as with Dell’s Flexible Computing Solution, a fresh OS is streamed for each session. These technologies enable companies to tightly control the desktop environment, whether it is simply to improve the manageability and cost of desktops or the organization’s security requirements mandate it.
In either case, productivity dictates that the applications required by the user are available to them instantly, regardless of location, hardware, or which virtual desktop gets assigned to them. And licenses dictate that there must be a high degree of visibility to where applications are at all times and that they are fully accounted for. Note that at any given time, an inventory scan of “desktops” to identify installed software will be unsatisfactory at best in any environment employing virtual desktops, as there will always be some portion of them that are simply not active. And the pattern of use tomorrow may be completely different from today. How does an IT department have any hope of insuring license compliance in such an environment?
Streaming handily solves the license management issue by simply taking a different approach to enforcement. The primary advantage of streaming in these environments is to separate the applications from the OS. This allows the OS image to be very simple and common across the entire organization. By not including the applications in the base image, licenses are not pre-consumed where they may never be needed, yet streaming insures that they will be present and functional on that hardware at a moment’s notice. So application licenses are consumed on a productivity basis only, and each new installation is counted against the total pool of licenses. This proactive approach limits the licenses installed to the number purchased and prevents ever being out of compliance in the first place. This also means that there is no need for a discovery or inventory process to determine compliance, impossible in a virtual desktop environment anyway.
As virtual desktops come, so do they go. It is equally important to be able to recover or re-harvest licenses that are no longer in use. For persistent virtual desktops, where the state is maintained between sessions, applications will be counted just like on traditional desktops, but may be automatically removed if unused for a defined period of time. In secure and highly volatile environments, where a new virtual desktop is assigned for each session, applications arrive automatically upon login, but vanish at the end of the session. Here, the recovered license must be accounted for so that it may be legitimately delivered again the next day. Otherwise licenses accumulate in desktops that no longer exist, and again there is no way to reconcile consumed licenses. Streaming can handle these situations automatically.
Managing virtual applications can be difficult because there are currently no standards for application virtualization, and in most cases, virtualization completely prevents the discovery of applications by traditional tools. Also, by design, virtualized applications are very portable and help to solve the problems of application compatibility and reliability in very dynamic environments. Ironically, it is these very environments that can be difficult or impossible to manage with the standard management suites. As in virtual desktops, the management of applications in a streamed environment does not rely upon a discovery process that is separate from the delivery mechanism. This means that even if you choose a virtualization technology that is incompatible with your current tools, streaming virtualized applications provides real-time visibility of every single application installation.
Aside from license compliance, which is often identified as the primary motivation for installing a streaming system, the initial delivery and ongoing maintenance of applications has become a real challenge in all environments. This is because traditional tools were designed from a server perspective, where everything is pushed out and relies on a relatively static set of target resources. Today, the percentage of desktop systems that remain stationary on the LAN, running the same applications day after day, is rapidly shrinking. Multi-user desktops, laptops, remote offices, frequently updated applications, etc. all contribute to the dynamic nature of today’s enterprises, conditions that conventional inventory, delivery and management tools were never designed to handle.
Streaming solves all of these problems by combining the most efficient delivery mechanism ever devised with real-time accounting and tracking of applications, whether conventional or virtualized. Instead of the manageability of systems being dependent upon their proximity to the data center or their association with a particular piece of hardware, streaming levels the playing field and allows IT professionals to manage all environments from a single system and treat them all exactly the same.
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