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Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops
dRawBaCks witH CuRRent
ViRtual desktop solutions
Although hosted virtual desktops offer significant advantages relative to traditional desktop delivery models,
the current solutions suffer from several drawbacks both from a user perspective and from an it perspective.
uSeR chAllenGeS with exiStinG viRtuAl deSktoP SolutionS
the biggest problem with current desktop virtualization solutions is the end-user experience.
user experience: Remote connection protocols such as RDp do not provide for a good or transparent
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end-user experience. RDp was designed in the terminal services era when multimedia was not a large
part of the corporate computing experience.
Graphics: Graphic-enabled websites, video, and audio playback for training videos, company broadcasts,
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and other rich media streams pose significant problems. In addition, many of today’s solutions do not
support multiple monitors in a seamless manner.
Bi-directional audio/video: Emerging multimedia applications like soft and ip phones or video
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conferencing clients do not work with existing virtual desktop and connection protocol solutions.
peripheral support: current solutions have limited support (if any) for connecting usB peripherals such
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as pDas or storage devices to the client, and having them appear connected to the virtual desktop.
it chAllenGeS with exiStinG RetRofitted viRtuAl deSktoP SolutionS
In addition to the end-user challenges, current solutions are difficult to implement and manage from an
IT perspective. This is because most existing virtual desktop solutions are retrofitted server virtualization
solutions, and lack the essential functionality required for virtual desktops. Specifically:
user experience and system load/economics: the user experience problem described above is not only
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a user problem, but also an it problem. the reason for this is that if the user experience is not the same
or better than a physical pc, end-users will never accept it and will always escalate issues with it. in
addition, RDp-based systems are very heavy on the host cpu, especially when processing multimedia.
this reduces the density of virtual desktops on a server, which in turn increases the overall system cost
because IT needs more servers to support a given number of virtual desktops. This makes retrofitted
server virtualization solutions cost-prohibitive.
system scalability: server virtualization solutions are designed to scale to hundreds of virtual servers,
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whereas virtual desktop products are required to scale in the thousands for production deployments.
consider an example of an enterprise that has 100 virtual servers. this is a medium-to-large size
deployment. using an industry average of 45-50 desktops per server, a similar scale deployment in the
desktop domain would be about 5,000 virtual desktops. this means 5,000 images, 5,000 users, and
5,000 clients. Very quickly, this gets to be two orders of magnitude larger in terms of the number of
objects to manage. Hence, virtual desktops require a virtualization management system designed to
scale to thousands of virtual machines. Retrofitted server virtualization management systems simply
cannot meet this requirement.
