Education labs and classrooms are excellent use cases for private cloud

Not surprisingly, since the release of my new book, Visible Ops – Private Cloud, I have been talking with a lot of people about how to deploy private cloud, where to start, what to avoid, etc. So far, the most common question has been, “What type of existing workloads are organizations putting into private cloud environments today – and what are they avoiding?”

So I thought I would jot down some of my answers, specifically related to ‘cloud-migrant’ services, as opposed to ‘cloud-native’ services – and without getting too hung up on whether the use cases are 100% cloud or not!

One recurrent use case is to provide dynamic desktop allocation, especially for education and projects use cases. A number of schools, universities, training centers, and even some larger enterprises, have adopted private cloud to allocate servers, clients, applications and data for reusable desktop systems.

This seems especially prevalent for short-term learning facilities, repeatable one-off classroom systems, training/demo labs at conventions (or user groups), and contractor setup. It is also similar to the executive briefing centers and ‘demos on demand’ that many software sales organizations (like CA Technologies) use.

Another service-based use case I have seen in several universities is self-service access for students and faculty, using pooled resources, not only for application services but also for full VDI desktop allocation.

I have seen this in other enterprises too – most notably for home-source process workers (e.g. call center, data entry) – but mostly as a proof-of-concept, not a large-scale production deployment.

However, most cloud-migrant workloads I see deployed to private clouds today still tend to be server-based. Most of these are at ‘Phase 1′ in the Visible Ops Private Cloud – a reorientation of virtualization deployments to pilot a private cloud that works, proving results, gaining skills, and hopefully measuring opportunities. It is still focused on servers, not services, but provides a vital part of the learning curve toward private cloud.

For example:

• Dev/test/QA servers – 3-tier LAMP stacks (app/Db/WS), but also LAMP components, IDEs, source code management tools, etc. (which often results in applications that run on a private cloud in production)
• Collaboration servers – especially SharePoint, but also Web-based collaboration services like team chat servers, content repositories, blogs, wikis, and project management tools
• Engineering servers – I have seen a number of engineering firms move their design project systems (especially CAD tools) into private clouds so engineers can fire up new design projects on-demand
• Web servers – popular for marketing teams who can fire up their own Web servers, especially for short-term and/or localized promotions & campaigns
• Analytics servers – short-term number crunching of ‘big data’ (including BI applications) in medical research, social marketing, pharmaceutical research, higher education, financial, logistics, etc

The workloads that are less suited to private cloud deployment are harder to identify, because it requires positive evidence of absence, so my thoughts here are much more anecdotal. I do see CIOs push back on migrating ‘core’ applications, even to private clouds, citing lack of confidence, performance concerns, potential security and compliance issues, and lack of ROI. I would not agree these are always good reasons, but they can be, and are certainly understandable.

In my opinion, private cloud is not ideally suited to relatively large, static, predictable, and resource-saturating workloads – think ERP or Data Warehouse. After all, used internally such applications are almost never deployed ‘on demand’; they are rarely if ever ‘multi-tenant’; they have no real benefit from an ‘infinitely scalable’ infrastructure; and are mostly viewed as a cost of doing business, without any ‘resource measurement’ or chargeback.

(btw, there are certainly good arguments to deploy these applications on a public cloud, as ‘cloud-native’ services using SaaS, to outsource them to a non-cloud third-party, or to just virtualize them – even with 1:1 virtualization – without the other trappings of cloud. Such alternatives could deliver better cost savings, higher up-time, faster DR, and other benefits. However, I think the upside of putting such applications in a private cloud is less apparent.)

That said, I do think that we will see more and more strategic services – as opposed to project servers – deployed in both private and public cloud as it matures. In fact, recent IDC data suggests CIOs that are adopting private cloud will migrate many core applications in the coming years. Moreover, some of the more advanced customers I talk with are already doing this, although they are by far in the minority.

Either way, I will be very interested to see how this all pans out.

What do you think? What have I missed? What types of workloads do you see being deployed in a private cloud? What are CIOs passing over in their evaluations? Are they right, or wrong? What criteria should they use?

Please feel free to continue the discussion in the comments below, or hit me up on Twitter with your ideas.

This post was originally published on the CA Communities website.

The author, Andi Mann (left), speaking with Roger Green of CIOZone.com during VMworld 2010

At VMworld 2010, I had the great pleasure to record a video interview with Roger Green, Executive Editor at CIOZone.com. We chatted for about 20 minutes in total (in 2 parts) about virtualization, the issues of virtual stall (including both causes and solutions), how the antecedents of virtualization can inform our modern approaches, the importance of data center automation, the impending tsunami of cloud computing, and much more.

If you have not seen it, you can find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

(btw, if you have not seen the video archive on CIOZone.com, you really should – it includes some fantastic interviews with many virtualization and cloud experts and thought leaders including Microsoft Director David Greschler, Rackspace CTO John Engates, VMware GM Jim Morrisroe, VMware CIO Mark Egan, and my colleague and counterpart in our Virtualization Product Management team, CA Technologies VP Subo Guha – plus a host of other CIOs and IT experts. Definitely worth your time!)

I found a comment on the CIOZone.com discussion thread about the interview very interesting. It came from CIOZone member, Pete Simmeron (petesim), who posted:

Andi Mann, thanks for the great conversation, I learned a fair amount about some of the obstacles to implementing a virtualization solution. You mention issues like license control, deprovisioning excess virtualized servers, compliance, and how IT support staff do not necessarily scale to help bring an organization to the Utopian 100% virtualized environment. Well my question is then how do we move past these obstacles? Do we start slow and develop the necessary skills in house or do we hire from outside, and thinking ahead do you think this will become a highly sought after job skill in the next 10 years??

What a great question! It inspired me to a longer response than might be appropriate in a comment box, but here it is in full:

Pete, thanks for the comment.

Moving past the obstacles is certainly the goal, and it is not easy, but it is possible. I think automation tools are massively important, but people and process are key too.

For example, to manage licences properly, and to track which VMs are being used and which can be reclaimed, some type of asset and inventory registry is an excellent tool. However, to really make this valuable, instead of just adding work manually recording VM allocations and movements, it really has to be updated automatically when VMs are provisioned and deprovisioned. This will save resources (admins don’t have to manually assign and collect VMs and licenses), save costs (licences can be more easily reused instead of adding new license costs), and help expand virtualization deployment and maturity (admins can move onto virtualizing more complex systems, rather than just babysitting existing VMs).

However, it is also important to address the people & process issues, not just the technology issues. For example, you have to make sure that IT admins and even VM owners don’t deliberately find ‘workarounds’ for the asset registry that might make their job a little easier, and maybe even save their department some money, but which actually end up costing the wider company a lot more in terms of compliance breaches and increased license costs. It is also critical to make sure there is a clear, known, and easily accessed process in place (ideally one which is automatically enforced) to work with VM owners/requestors to identify and deprovision VMs that are no longer in use. This will make sure the technology benefits accrue as expected, but also will simplify some complex and problematic VM management activities.

As to where you start, a lot depends on existing process and technology maturity, organization size, the most pressing problems, and the overall goals. Most orgs will do best to solve one problem at a time with the people they have – perhaps managing VM performance, or controlling licenses, or automating provisioning. But very mature orgs will likely be able to do more up front, like implementing a service catalog and service desk approach to automated provisioning and deprovisioning, or even combining this with resource pools and self-service to start on the journey to cloud computing. Meanwhile, smaller orgs will probably need to bring in experts at least temporarily to help them get over the hump, as they are typically harder-pressed to skill up and resource in-house for such significant IT changes.

Finally, yes, I absolutely believe this will be an in-demand skill for years to come. The evidence is already there, in the higher average pay rates for administrators with virtualization certifications, and I think this will continue. Administrators and managers that can effectively harness tools, processes, and people to overcome virtual stall will end up driving advances in virtualization – not just increasing the number of VMs deployed, but improving their virtualization maturity. This in turn will drive not just the incremental (albeit short-lived) CapEx savings from server consolidation, but also to fundamental and long-term gains in OpEx reduction, business agility, service availability, continuity, and more that comes when virtualization (and cloud) transforms from a tactical IT project to a strategic business enabler.

Of course, I have an opinion (anyone who knows me will not be at all surprised by that!), but I am also very interested in what other people think is going to be the key to Pete’s questions. Please do go ahead and check out the video on CIOZone.com, and please add to the discussion either there or here. Or, like me, both!

I was pointed the other day to a chart on the Business Insider ‘Chart of the Day’ (@chartoftheday) showing the R&D expenditures for a handful of tech companies, evidence of Apple’s supposedly superior ‘innovation’ compared to four apparently randomly chosen tech companies.

On the surface, I thought it was an interesting idea, so I looked at R&D spending in companies that are actually related, in the virtualization and cloud computing space. With a little research on Google Finance, I put together the following chart:

Source: Google Finance/SEC

While it is interesting to look at these numbers, and individual comparisons can be somewhat revealing, I don’t see a reliable correlation between technology innovation and R&D spending – either as a percentage of revenues, or an absolute amount.

I’ll just leave it here though. Feel free to comment on what you think this means.

Appendix: For the Inquisitive

If you are geek like me, you are probably wondering exactly what R&D means in context of publicly filed SEC documents. For the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), R&D is defined as follows

a. Research is planned search or critical investigation aimed at discovery of new knowledge with the hope that such knowledge will be useful in developing a new product or service (hereinafter “product”) or a new process or technique (hereinafter “process”) or in bringing about a significant improvement to an existing product or process.

b. Development is the translation of research findings or other knowledge into a plan or design for a new product or process or for a significant improvement to an existing product or process whether intended for sale or use. It includes the conceptual formulation, design, and testing of product alternatives, construction of prototypes, and operation of pilot plants. It does not include routine or periodic alterations to existing products, production lines, manufacturing processes, and other on-going operations even though those alterations may represent improvements and it does not include market research or market testing activities.

Financial Accounting Standards Board, Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 2–Accounting for Research and Development Costs, October 1974, p5

The source also has a number of useful examples of what is and is not, considered R&D. Of particular note, the following are not included in R&D costs:

• On-going efforts to refine, enrich, or otherwise improve upon the qualities of an existing product
• Adaptation of an existing capability to a particular requirement or customer’s need
• Legal work in connection with patent applications or litigation
• Intangibles that are purchased from others … that have alternative future uses

You may also want to check the data for yourself too. It all comes from the most recent annual reports, as recorded in Google Finance. I have included the data below, with links to the original Google Finance pages. Hopefully I have transcribed it correctly. Enjoy!

Enterprise desktops may soon be a thing of the past

In my last blog, I talked about the idea of a ‘software mainframe’, and how – if that term really means anything – IBM could actually be a serious threat to VMware (and the Virtual Computing Environment coalition of VMware/Cisco/EMC) , if it decided to support native Windows guests on its zSeries mainframes. As I noted in that post, I think this is far from impossible, and would change the face of the server virtualization substantially.

After I published that blog it occurred to me that IBM’s biggest opportunity may not be (or may not only be) in server virtualization. After all, VMware has a pretty good lock on that market right now, so simply getting penetration would be very tough (just ask Microsoft!). Plus, scaling out a zSeries platform with 1000 or more virtual servers in one hit is a major project, with a major upfront hardware budget, that is not going to fit many server virtualization & consolidation initiatives.

However, consider the needs of a desktop refresh. For even a relatively small refresh of a few thousand desktops, hardware costs alone can run well into six and even seven figures. It only takes 2000 desktops at $500 a piece to crack into the million-dollar hardware range – and you can accommodate a substantial mainframe in that kind of budget.

How about the mainframe then, not as an enterprise server, but as an enterprise desktop server?

In fact, IBM already has almost all the piece-parts it needs to deliver this.

To start with, according to IBM, the new IBM zEnterprise 196 mainframe supports up to 96 total cores, each running at a lightning-fast 5.2-GHz. ComputerWorld reports it can support up to 3TB of memory on board, and can also manage external Power and x86 IBM blade systems to support up to 114 blades with eight cores. IBM says that means the new zEnterprise can manage more than 100,000 virtual machines, has 60% more capacity than its predecessor, the System z10, is up to 60% faster than the z10, and can deliver up to an 80% saving on energy compared to x86 architectures.

Big claims? Big machine.

As to the virtualization layer, the zSeries comes with virtualization built-in, of course, courtesy of the z/VM architecture, and its ability to run Linux (31-bit and 64-bit) and OpenSolaris natively. It also supports KVM-based virtualization, and before IBM stripped it down to make IBM PowerVM, the predecessor technology acquired from Transitive in late 2008 supported virtualization of applications for Windows, Mac, AIX, i5/OS, Linux, and Solaris/SPARC. Transitive also supported pSeries, PowerPC, Intel Mac, IA64, and x86 architectures. Moreover, the zSeries can even run standalone C/C++ and Java workloads natively.

With just a little engineering, it is not difficult to imagine a single zSeries mainframe serving up end-user desktops and applications regardless of platform – Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mac, or even Java/C++ native. Talk about a data center in a box!

It is not just the back-end data center components either. IBM also has an innovative desktop virtualization partnership with Canonical Ubuntu and Virtual Bridges VERDE, which can deliver both Linux and Windows desktop clients hosted from a Linux VDI backend (with offline client support too).

Moreover, the mainframe excels at four areas that are among the biggest hurdles in VDI-style desktop virtualization – high bandwidth, high CPU, high memory, and high storage utilization rates.

So, how about an IBM zEnterprise:

• delivering thousands of Windows, Linux, Solaris, and even MacOS (!) client from one enterprise server
• serving up desktop productivity tools like Lotus Symphony and Notes (or maybe OpenOffice.org), perhaps even running natively
• using the Verde native capability, or integrating with an open-source Xen or KVM client hypervisor, to enable a ‘mobile/hosted’ hybrid desktop
• partnering with a third party streaming vendor to deliver ‘on-demand’ desktops and applications
• All of the above, offered in a hosted Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model, through IBM Global Services (which some partners already do – in part)

Now that would upset the endpoint virtualization apple cart!

Of course, IBM is not the only vendor that could take aim at delivering an ‘all-in-one’ enterprise VDI server. The Cisco UCS has exceptional benchmarks for memory, throughput, and storage, as does the HP Integrity Superdome, but at least on spec neither comes close to the high-end of the zEnterprise in processor or memory capacity. Oracle (mainly through its Sun acquisition) has all of the virtualization components, from desktop to server, including hardware and software, but is struggling with maturity and in any case cannot deliver the sort of hardware specs that Cisco or HP does, let alone IBM.

IBM, on the other hand – within a hair either way – has it all, right now.

I have no significant inside knowledge on any of the desktop virtualization strategies of these vendors. In fact, so far, this is just a barely cooked idea in the back of my mind. It may be ludicrous in any number of ways. However, there is clearly an opportunity here, and it would be interesting to see if IBM could or would try – not least to see client computing come full circle from mainframe-attached terminals, to standalone PCs, back to mainframe-attached desktops.

And to be able to say, to all those who (still!) claim the mainframe is dead, “long live the enterprise (desktop) server!”

There is a growing chatter about the idea that businesses should provide staff with a free choice of PC technology (including Windows, Mac, Linux, or other devices), and indeed that staff should be given a cash allowance (at Citrix, for example, the allowance is $2100) to purchase and use their own PC for company and personal use.

Many claims are made to support this so called Bring Your Own PC (BYOPC) approach – although they seem mostly, if not only, to originate from vendors (notably desktop virtualization and application virtualization vendors) that have a vested commercial interest in its success. I disagree with many of these claims (especially the questionable claims of cost reduction), but I do agree that BYOPC can have some benefits.

However, one of the many claims in support of BYOPC is that it will help organizations to attract and retain an important demographic of young, technologically sophisticated employees – the so-called ‘millennials’,  ‘echo boomers’, ‘generation next’, or ‘generation Y’, all loose terms generally used to describe people aged between 18 and 35 years old.

Personally, I find this claim to be absurd.

My main issue with this claim is the implicit assumption that millennials have such a strong choice in their employment options that issues like what type of operating system they use, or what device they work on, can be significant decision factors in whether or not to accept a job offer.

This flies in the face of unemployment statistics that suggest, today more than ever, millennials simply do not have this level of choice. Put plainly, in the near term millennials should be happy to simply get a job offer, let alone one that comes with over $2000 to buy themselves a shiny new MacBook Air.

Specifically, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (see chart below) shows that in fourth quarter of 2009, unemployment for 18-35 year olds was on average 17%. For males specifically, this was on average 25%, and as high as 30%  (for males, 18-19 y.o). Compare this to the national average for ages 35 and above – 8% for the general population, and 9% for males – and you can see that this demographic does not exactly have abundant bargaining power on the job market.

Unemployment by age, sex, marital status 2006-2009 (Source: BLS)

Perhaps this will change over time, but as the chart above shows, unemployment for millennials has been trending up, not just since the onset of the recession around the end of 2008, but at least since 2006. It may (and hopefully will) come down dramatically, improving millenials’ bargaining power for employment,  but there is no sign that this is happening, or that it will happen anytime soon. And remember, when we are looking at BYOPC it is not only for technology workers,  but also (perhaps primarily) for knowledge workers across many fields – sales, finance, management, R&D, etc. – so any specific skill shortages in IT that may skew millennials’ bargaining power do not really come into play.

Of course, there are probably nuances here that a behavioural statistician would find and explain much better than I can – granular variations by  age, education, location, industry, and more. For example, unemployment among slightly older millennials aged 25 to 34,  many of whom presumably have college degrees, is much lower than millennials aged 18 to 24. Yet at over 10% unemployment, even this group still has an unemployment rate several percentage points higher than ages 35 and up (just under 8%).

However, I do not see any promoters of BYOPC incorporating such detailed demographic analysis to substantiate their claims for BYOPC; rather, most seem to just be making unsubstantiated claims using baseless assumptions about millennials’ employment ‘needs’ without even considering widely available independent data that substantially undermines their position.

Sure, there are studies that suggest, for example, that millennials consider “state-of-the-art technology is an important consideration in selecting an employer.” However, the most credible of these studies was conducted prior to the global economic downturn, when unemployment among 18-35 year olds was just 9-10% – almost half what it is today. In any case, an organization does not need a BYOPC program simply to provide state-of-the-art technology. If an employer gives a millennial employee a top-of-the-line company-owned Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, or Apple laptop, would they turn the job down just because they cannot buy it themselves?

So based on a cursory analysis of recent, credible, and available data, the idea that a young person would turn down a job in this economic climate, simply because they can’t get their preferred laptop or mobile device seems to me quite ridiculous. At best, it may help companies attract the very top tier of millennial graduates who do have multiple job offers to choose from, but I expect this would still be the least of the considerations of 18-35 year olds. Even for the best of them, this likely pales compared to significant concerns about compensation, vacation and holidays, health care, education support, flexible hours, corporate ethics, retirement funding, work-life balance, telecommuting, career opportunities, and more.

This then has significant implications for CIOs and others looking at BYOPC.  Despite the validity (or otherwise) of any other claims in favour of BYOPC, no organization should be looking to BYOPC to attract and retain staff from the echo boom generation. They would be better off looking at a dozen or more other important factors than spending the significant time, effort, and money on implementing a BYOPC program.

Today Novell released the details of their eagerly awaited Intelligent Workload Management (IWM) solutions. Novell has an exceptional opportunity, great development, and an excellent product line that clearly makes sense in this newly defined ‘market’. Plus, Novell really had to respond to their seriously lackluster financial performance in their 4^th Quarter and Annual earnings announcement,where it announced a GAAP net loss in fourth fiscal quarter of 2009 of $256 million, and a GAAP net loss for the financial year of $213 million. Even the non-GAAP figures were awful (and personally, I do not believe non-GAAP figures are much better than a shell game), with Q4 net income of only $38 million, and net income for the full fiscal year of $117 million.

Enter Intelligent Workload Management (IWM), which, according to the Novell press release is:

… Novell’s differentiated approach to Intelligent Workload Management [that] integrates identity and systems management capabilities into an application workload, thereby increasing the workload’s security and portability across physical, virtual and cloud environments

All I can say is … bravo Novell!

No, really. It is about time. Novell has exceptional capabilities in virtualization, automation, and service management; and it also adds critical capabilities for security management and compliance, especially around identity management.  These are all core values in what EMA calls ‘the responsible cloud’.

The EMA thesis, essentially, is that cloud computing has too many cowboys, and not enough sheriffs. Enter Novell, the “Doc” Holliday of the cloud landscape, with responsible capabilities for virtualization, automation, service management, and security and compliance.

IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and even Oracle might argue with Novell in some of its claims of uniqueness – after all, all of them have substantial capabilities in all these areas too.

However, regardless of some overreaching in their marketing, competitive threats, a nascent market, and gaps in actual product capability, Novell has an excellent opportunity to re-brand itself and deliver some exceptional capabilities to deliver on private cloud computing goals, and is as well positioned as any vendor to stake a claim to what they label ‘Intelligent Workload Management’.

Keep an eye out for EMA’s more detailed Impact Brief on this announcement. Very interesting stuff, without doubt.

Andi.

HP Software & Solutions recently conducted a global CIO survey with CIO Magazine on virtualization trends.  Shay Mowlem, Director Virtualization Strategy with HP, and Jim Malone, Editorial Director of CXO Media’s Custom Solutions Group, held a free webcast last week to cover the details of the survey.  If you missed it, you should certainly check out the replay.

The survey revealed some very interesting data, with a very well thought out instrument and a quality sample – 300 respondents (100 each from the US, EMEA, and Asia Pacific) with at least 500 employees in the US (250 in the UK, France, Germany, Australia, Singapore and India), and all with a current or planned investment in server virtualization.

A number of data points stand out for me:

• The balance of Test/Dev implementations vs. Production continues to reflect EMA data. While production is still lagging behind test and dev as a use case, virtualization for mission-critical production is only slightly behind test and dev overall – and within the margin of error in most cases. This is good news, as enterprises clearly continue to grow real, production use cases.  It was interesting to see the differences between US and EMEA/APAC on this data point too, something EMA has not broken out in our published reports.
• Microsoft and VMware are neck and neck in enterprises’ plans for server virtualization deployments over the next 18 months. I was called crazy when my 2008 EMA research pointed to a 32% growth rate for Microsoft Hyper-V into 2009, trailing only VMware; yet here we are in 2009, and according to this new study, through 2010/11 that is going up to 49%. So who is crazy now?
• The strong growth for endpoint (desktop, application) virtualization reflects EMA data very well. It also highlights where enterprises and vendors should be heading with management technologies. It is still early days, but there are  a lot of gaps in integrated management for physical and virtual endpoints. So it is clear that this (probably even more than cloud service management) is going to be the next big problem for IT management.
• The percentage of IT services planned to be virtualized over 18 months is growing well. However, just as EMA has predicted, virtualization will remain at only around 50% of service deployments even through 2011, so there will continue to be substantial physical deployments. This reinforces my consistent (and insistent) position that effective management of virtualization must integrate both physical and virtual systems management
• Effective management continues to be elusive. EMA’s research showed this in 2006, 2008, and 2009, and this new data (with some reservations) shows the same. However, while tThe majority (64%) of enterprises rank themselves as extremely or very effective at managing virtualization, and believe they are getting better, I am skeptical. I contend many of those are overestimating their abilities (see my next points).
• Virtualization clearly increases complexity, and is clearly more difficult to manage. I felt like I was tilting at windmills when I published this opinion in 2006 and in 2008, contrary to common perceptions that virtualization made everything easier. I was certainly a lone voice, but as it turned out, a prescient one. It is great to see it being recognized more broadly, finally.
• Human issues continue to be major problems – especially skills and resourcing. EMA has found the same to be true, consistently, for many years. As recently as last week, I spoke with David Marshall of VMBlog and InfoWorld about how this continues to be a problem. This makes management tools even more important – to embed knowledge, define and execute policy, and automate routine work to free up resources.
• These data points all increase my doubt that enterprises are really being better at managing their virtual environments. It seems contradictory to me that this survey shows virtualization is more complex, management is the top inhibitor to ROI, and skills are still lacking, yet most enterprises think they are being very or extremely effective at it. Even though tool usage is more integrated and automated than it has been, this does not make sense. I am instead convinced that enterprises are really overestimating their abilities.

This is just a very small sample of the interesting data in this survey – there are more than 50 pages in the slide deck I reviewed ahead of the webcast. I encourage you to check out the webcast.  If you get in touch with HP, I am sure they will point you in the right direction; or check back here, and I will post the link when it is up.

Andi.

A couple of days ago, I was dropped into the middle of a sticky situation with one of my clients, a service provider of desktop systems – both physical and virtual (VMware and Citrix) – to schools across the country. This situation provides a great case study (or war story) of endpoint virtualization, especially the challenges that human issues pose to project success.

The General Manager had hired a new architect, a ‘virtualization expert’, to handle a new project. The architect designed a solution using server-hosted virtual desktops (in this case using XenDesktop) for the teachers and administrators in a school environment. The physical systems would use PXE boot to load a virtual desktop containing the apps that the teachers and administrators needed (essentially just Office 2007).

The problem was the teachers and administrators all had laptops, and needed to take their work home; meanwhile, the school was running a wireless network.  The laptops would need to establish and secure a wireless network connection before the virtual desktop could be loaded (via PXE). Unfortunately, they cannot establish a wireless connection until after they have already loaded an operating system. Catch 22.

My client – the desktop manager at the company – was called in to fix the problems created by the ‘virtualization expert’. He actually solved the technology issues pretty easily, by designing a new solution using server-based application virtualization (in this case with XenApp) on top of a simple, local, Windows installation. A common Windows installation would be easy to maintain; teachers could access their applications from any LAN or Internet connected location; applications and data would still be centrally stored and secured; they could cache applications on users’ laptops for offline use; and they could even publish a full virtual desktop for each user if they desired.

Despite some tradeoffs, it was clearly a better solution for their requirements.

When he called me, it was ostensibly to help him validate the new solution, but in the end my assignment wasn’t really about the technology; it was to help resolve relationship issues with the client, explain the project change to the client, advise them on license issues, help to get the customer on board with a different technology, liaise with the GM over resourcing and skill levels, etc.

As is typical, the human issues were the sticking point. After all – technology is easy; people are hard. In fact, throughout the project, the real problem had been human issues – a lack of time and people; lack of skills or knowledge; and interdepartmental political issues:

• Lacking the time and people internally for their endpoint virtualization initiatives, the company had hired an ‘expert’ with strong server virtualization knowledge.
• Sadly, that person was himself lacking in skills and knowledge when it came to endpoint virtualization, so he designed a solution that would not work.
• This created the political problems, as they failed to deliver the ‘virtual desktops’ that the customer was expecting.

These issues are in fact very typical, and EMA research (‘Real World Experiences of Endpoint Virtualization‘) shows they are actually the top three challenges most organizations need to overcome when implementing or expanding end-user virtualization deployments.

So what are the key takeaways for endpoint virtualization projects from this experience?

• Devote time and resource to training internal staff – virtualization skills are tough to find, and most companies don’t have enough of them in-house; conversely, IT staff consistently cite training & skills development as a key reason they stay with their employers. Seems like training existing staff should be a no-brainer.
• Use desktop experts for endpoint virtualization projects – EMA research has shown convincingly that the desktop team are the best people to handle endpoint virtualization projects. They are intimately familiar with the unique facets of endpoint environments (like the PXE limitations of WiFi networking), user requirements, mobility, application delivery, etc. Server people don’t deal with these issues every day; desktop people do.
• If you do need new people, get the right ones – and if you train internally first, then you have a much better shot at hiring better new people too. In this case, they might have been able to see that a server virtualization guy was not the right fit for their endpoint virtualization needs.
• Don’t get hung up on specific products or technologies – focus instead on solving problems. Endpoint virtualization is a continuum of technologies, each suited for different users and use cases. Understand that the best solutions may even involve multiple platforms, technologies, and even vendors.

This is a keen lesson on how to approach user-facing IT in general, and for endpoint virtualization in particular. Use your desktop expertise, supplemented with good training, and a deep understanding of your customer requirements, to focus on providing solutions to problems, rather than installing technologies and products.

[edited November 6, 2009 at 11:29:27 am - added link to EMA research]

Back in September 2009, EMA released a research report that I authored, titled Real World Experiences of Endpoint Virtualization*. In it, I defined and used a new term (for EMA), ‘Endpoint Virtualization’. 

In the report, I defined ‘Endpoint Virtualization’ as:

a (mostly) new set of technologies aimed at abstracting the end user experience – typically their logical desktop, application, and/or workspace environments – from the physical systems they rely on to provide that experience – typically a physical desktop or laptop PC.

This primary research covered many different technologies, including:

• Application Isolation – where an application is installed locally, but in a ‘bubble’, ‘sandbox’, or ‘layer’ that does not use the standard installation (e.g. VMware ThinApp, Novell ZENworks Application Virtualization)
• Remote Application Virtualization – where end users access a single-user application hosted on a remote/data-center system on the corporate LAN (e.g. Citrix XenApp, Microsoft App-V)
• Application or OS streaming – where an application or desktop OS is delivered incrementally from a remote/data-center system on the corporate LAN (e.g. Symantec Workspace Streaming, Endeavors)
• Remote (server-hosted) desktop virtualization – where a user accesses a full desktop environment from a remote/data-center system on the corporate LAN (e.g. Quest vWorkspace, Citrix XenDesktop)
• Local (client-hosted) OS virtualization – where a user runs multiple independent operating environment(s) locally on top of their standard operating system (e.g. MokaFive, VMware Fusion)
• Client-Side Hypervisor – where a user runs multiple independent operating environment(s) locally directly on the BIOS, without an underlying operating system (e.g. Virtual Computer NxTop, Neocleus)
• Browser-based applications – applications hosted on a corporate Web server, accessed over the LAN via a Web browser, with little or no local code installation (typically custom or in-house)
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – individual applications hosted by a third party, accessed over the Internet via a Web browser, with little or no local code installation (e.g. Salesforce.com, PingConnect)
• Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) – entire end-user desktop environments hosted by a third party, accessed over the public Internet, with little or no local code (e.g. Desktone, Doyenz)

What I did not explain, and what a number of people have asked me since, is “Why does EMA use the term ‘Endpoint Virtualization’?”

A number of terms have been used by various analysts, media,  vendors, and users to describe this space. However, I don’t think anyone is looking at or defining the same breadth of the market as EMA and I do. Given the research data that showed these technologies were barely separable in real world use cases, I needed a a single term that covered all of them.

My  first thought (that I used in all the drafts of this report) was ‘end-user-facing virtualization’. While accurate and descriptive, it is too cumbersome to be usable, so I always knew that was going to be replaced.

I also rejected all the other terms I have seen for various reasons:

• Desktop virtualization, application virtualization – both too narrow for the broad space I was researching, with each excluding the other
• Client virtualization – the legacy of ‘client-server’, common usage of ‘client’ to mean ‘customer’, and lack of breadth killed this for me
• Presentation virtualization -  only describes remote delivery, so excludes local virtualization, SaaS, browser apps, etc.
• User virtualization – does not work for me at all, because I think of users as people, not technologies
• Workspace virtualization – too specific to desktop virtualization, plus a ‘workspace’ is anything from a cubicle to a bench with a drill-press

What’s more, the end user experience is more than just desktops and laptops. VMware CTO Stephen Herrod spoke at VM Forum Sydney (my home town) about VMware on Android, and VMware desktop CTO Scott Davis has been talking Android on his blog too. Similarly, Citrix’s CEO Mark Templeton demonstrated Citrix Receiver for iPhone as far back as May 2009**.

So I looked at the term ‘endpoint’, a term used commonly in IT management, and by many different vendors, in phrases such as in ‘endpoint management’, ‘endpoint security’, ‘endpoint encryption’, ‘data endpoint’, ‘endpoint provisioning’, etc. By most definitions, ‘endpoint’ accommodates all the ways the computing experiences can be made available to, and used by, an end user – including PCs, Macs, desktops, laptops, & mobile devices; centralized or Internet-based delivery mechanisms as well as local implementations; full desktop operating systemsor just individual applications; and both online or offline use cases.

Thus, I settled on ‘Endpoint Virtualization’ as EMA’s standard term for these various technologies.

Will it hold up over time? Will an irresistible groundswell form behind some other term that will force me to change? It is hard to tell, and I am certainly interested in your opinions. For now though, I think this is the best possible term, and will continue to use it throughout my writings and presentations with EMA.

Andi.

** Off-topic – what is it with vendor C-level elites targeting edge platforms like Android and iPhone? Seems to me it would be more useful if they targeted the enterprise-friendly mobile platforms that more real business users work on – like Blackberry or Windows Mobile. But that is a rant for another time