Why VDI will take off in 2010: is it about servers or desktops?
I was recently asked by CRN magazine to comment on whether I agreed with VMware that VDI is poised to take off in 2010. I said yes, but for different reasons than VMware. You can read the article here.
As a server virtualization vendor, VMware sees VDI as an extension to server consolidation, which is why they believe VDI will be driven by companies that have already adopted virtualization.
But we see a much larger opportunity for VDI - it addresses a desktop problem that every desktop IT administrator is interested in solving, assuming they can make the math work. Desktop IT wants to address the operational headaches and cost of managing PCs, but they need to solve this problem within their existing desktop budgets. They are driving the agenda for VDI, and its not about datacenter consolidation. With new architectures like ours making VDI less expensive to acquire than PCs, desktop IT can now use virtual desktops as an alternative to refreshing PCs, an option that didn't exist a year ago.
We believe this is the driving force that will make VDI attainable for everyone, and will drive an upswell in adoption. We are definitely seeing this, and we look forward to an exciting 2010!
Brian Madden had an interesting post yesterday on why a non-technical business person would be interested in VDI. Brian surmised "the same benefits of Terminal Services without the hassles" as one compelling reason. This makes sense, because with VDI you don't have to learn a new OS(Terminal Services), you don't have app compatibility issues, and you can run the full desktop.
But, does traditional VDI bring with it a new set of hassles bigger than the ones it replaces? We talk to several customers who want to upgrade from Terminal Services to VDI, but are daunted by the cost and complexity of traditional VDI - the ROI is unclear, traditional VDI requires a cultural change away from the desktop team as it involves managing memory pools, virtualization resources, and the top-down VDI model doesn't fit how desktops are typically upgraded (in phases).
What our customers tell us is that VDI as an upgrade to Terminal Services is compelling IF:
The math works: If they can get VDI at the cost of a PC, without a huge upfront investment.
No cultural change is needed: Desktop IT should be able to deploy and manage the VDI solution
Companies don't have to change how they buy/upgrade desktops: which typically happens in phases (e.g. as desktops age, or one department/branch at a time). Traditional VDI is typically not cost-effective below a few thousand desktops because of the massive upfront investment it requires.
This is precisely what Kaviza delivers - all the benefits of Terminal Services, without the hassles, and with no new costs or complexity. Try it for yourself.
Happy New Year! We hope 2010 is a joyous and prosperous year for everyone!
The amazing thing in our global economy is how truly "around the clock" things are these days. To give you an example, virtualization guru Doug Brown posted a videocast on Kaviza and a podcast interview, both on December 21, 2009. As a VDI expert, Doug completely "gets" the value of simplicity and affordability - I had a wonderful time recording these sessions with him, and we had a long conversation offline chatting about the space afterwards.
Anyway, expecting things to be slow during the holidays, I thought I would wait until this week to blog about it. As it turns out, we received a bunch of downloads on our site the last two weeks from all around the world. I guess the quiet holiday time is a good occasion for folks to try out new products!
Speaking of which, we just released our latest version with support for Windows 7, a gateway for secure SSL-based remote access, and a standalone Java client. Try it out if you get a chance, and tell us what you think!
Computerworld describes View4's shortcomings and how Kaviza avoids these
Computerworld wrote an interesting article on 5 shortcomings they see with VMWare View4 - one of which is its high bandwidth requirements over WANs. The article quotes Chris Wolf from Burton Group as saying Kaviza's VDI appliance approach overcomes this. The article goes on to describe other shortcomings, including cost - although VMWare claims View4 can cost as little as $750/desktop, they concede this is assuming you deploy at least 2,048 users, and use the VMWare-Cisco-EMC storage-server-software package AND use a repurposed PC. This means a minimum investment of $1.5M is needed to get such a price advantage, and you are still stuck with old PCs!
Kaviza, of course, delivers virtual desktops at a total cost (including hardware, software, storage) for under $500/PC, and this is true for both small (as little as 25 desktops) to very large (2,000+ desktops) deployments. How does Kaviza accomplish this?
Kaviza is the only VDI vendor that has rearchitected the entire stack above the hypervisor to be focused on desktop virtualization, and hence runs on inexpensive commodity servers with direct-attached storage. Kaviza lowers the infrastructure costs of VDI by about 1/3rd to 1/4th by eliminating the need for shared storage and multiple servers.
Furthermore, as Chris points out, Kaviza offers total flexibility in deployment - you can place Kaviza VDI appliances at remote/branch offices and manage them centrally for better performance in bandwidth-constrained environments or co-locate all the servers centrally. Kaviza provides this flexibility because Kaviza's Grid architecture is inherently distributed - it does not rely on centralized shared storage, thereby allowing the various appliances on a Grid to be distributed at different locations.
See how easy it is to setup and manage a Kaviza grid, download the free trial today!
Demo: See how easily you can deploy virtual desktops with Kaviza
See how easy it is to setup a Kaviza VDI-in-a-boxTM server and start deploying virtual desktops! Checkout the demo, and download here to try it for yourself.
VMWare's take on Windows 7: Cost is the Elephant in the Room
VMWare's executive recently talked about how he believes Windows 7 will be a catalyst for desktop virtualization, but expects adoption to be slow. What he doesn't tell you is an important reason why: cost. If its going to cost you $1000-2000/desktop to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 either with traditional PCs or virtual desktops, CIOs are asking if its worth it.
Gartner's VP Research, Michael Silver estimates that when you include replacement hardware, admin costs, application testing, and replacing incompatible apps, -- in a hypothetical organization with 2,500 Windows users -- the cost of upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 will run $1,035 to $1,930 per user. For 2,500 users, this is a $2.5M-$5M effort, which is substantial. Migrating to first generation VDI architectures such as View would be no cheaper. Analysts estimate the average upfront cost/desktop to be $1,200-2,000 for traditional VDI.
But what if you could upgrade from XP to Windows 7 for under $500/desktop, and get all the benefits of virtual desktops, with lower operating costs, greater security and the option to preserve the XP desktops to smoothen migration woes?
We are announcing today Windows 7 support with Kaviza's VDI-in-a-boxTM , a beta is coming in the next few weeks. You can get a Windows 7 virtual desktop for under $500, and this includes all the hardware, software licensing and storage costs. We are already getting a lot of partner and customer interest in this, so its going to be exciting!
Click here for a free trial of Kaviza's VDI-in-a-boxTM.
Wall Street Journal says desktop virtualization hot, but costs remain a barrier to adoption
Today's Wall Street Journal had a nice article on the growing customer interest in virtual desktops. It did a great job of summarizing the key benefits of virtual desktops: lower PC operating & management costs, better security, and lower power consumption. Gartner was quoted as saying, "desktop virtualization is the hottest trend among our customers".
All of this is wonderful, and very exciting. And, we completely agree. But...ok, you didn't really expect there to be no 'but', did you?... the article went on to say that adoption is still largely at the pilot stages. Why? Cost was cited as the reason:
"Vendors say customers won't save much initially buying thin clients instead of PCs because they still have to buy just as many software licenses and need to spend more for servers and storage. The biggest savings for most companies come in ongoing operating costs."
This is extremely interesting - because you have the current VDI vendors themselves acknowledging that upfront costs are a barrier to VDI adoption.
This is exactly the reason why we started Kaviza. With Kaviza, you get all the benefits of desktop virtualization at a cost of under $500/desktop - this includes all the software licenses, servers and storage you need to run that desktop. And, there are no real minimums to buy.
With quick-time-to-value added to all the other benefits of desktop virtualization, we believe we have a killer solution. Try it out and let us know if you agree.
Video overview of Kaviza's next-generation VDI architecture
Here is a video chalk talk describing why we founded Kaviza, the shortcomings of VDI today and how Kaviza's architecture addresses VDI cost & complexity. Take a look and let me know what you think!
The Register's poll finds cost is key roadblock to VDI adoption
Last week, UK's, "The Register" conducted a survey on VDI in which they found that although customer interst in VDI is high, customers see cost as the primary roadblock to adoption. This exactly matches our experience. We founded Kaviza to eliminate the cost and complexity of VDI. Here are some highlights from the survey resuts:
Server-based VDI was second only to Terminal Services (TS) as the most adopted form of desktop virtualization. Given how long TS has been around and how new VDI is this is quite remarkable and it validates the sort of interest that we are seeing among both customers and partners.
So if there is so much interest and understanding why aren't deployments going through the roof? What's holding VDI adoption back? Well, the latter questions of the survey bring that out well. It has to do with the costs.
Cost was picked by respondents as the major reason for not moving forward with VDI. Over 75% felt the upfront infrastructure and implementation costs of VDI was the biggest roadblock, followed closely by the high storage costs.
Of course, this is exactly why we founded Kaviza two years back. Having led VDI for large companies, we saw how expensive it is to implement traditional VDI. This is because traditional VDI is layered on top of a generic server virtualization platform and uses the same heavy infrastructure that was designed to virtualize a few mission critical applications (in the hundreds) as opposed to thousands of desktops. And therein lies the issue. Current VDI approaches require big-iron servers, shared storage like SANs, high-speed interconnects - all of which are expensive to acquire and deploy.
At Kaviza, we realized the only way to bring down the cost was to start from scratch. We set out to design a VDI architecture that could run on inexpensive commodity whiteboxes and scale horizontally like modern Web architectures (e.g. Google). No more high-speed interconnects and shared storage and servers with expensive FC HBA cards. Kaviza's VDI-in-a-box is a distributed next gen VDI solution that provides virtual desktops at sub-$500 prices (the pricepoint is the fully loaded cost of a virtual desktop, including Microsoft's VECD license and all the infrastructure). We recently launched a Beta, and the response has been overwhelming.
If you'd like to try it for yourself, check out our free trial. In and hour or two you should be up and running with a single server and many desktops. If you want HA, then email us to get the license that will allow you to tie many such boxes together without the need for shared storage, high-speed interconnects and all the other stuff needed for mission critical server virtualization. In case you want to read the articles: click here to participate in the survey, its still open. See the results here.
Bernd Harzog, analyst at http://www.virtualizationpractice.com, reviews new innovations in desktop virtualization that are driving down costs and improving usability. Here's how he describes Kaviza:
"Kaviza is determined to provide a VDI solution that leverages a scale-out architecture to provide a dramatically lower cost of purchase and deployment and a dramatically lower cost of operation than traditional VDI solutions. Kaviza does not require a SAN, and simply collects commodity servers with local storage into a resource tool which is managed with a distributed virtual appliance administration system."
Kaviza launches Beta of Multi-Box High Availability Release
Today is an exciting day for us at Kaviza. We launched a beta of our multi-box virtual desktop appliance which offers built-in high availability.
You can setup a highly available farm of virtual desktop servers by simply loading Kaviza on two or more commodity servers and linking them together. It is truly that simple - no custom coding, no expensive SAN's, high speed interconnects, or high end servers are needed. Our entire solution can be setup from scratch in under three hours. With Kaviza's unique shared-nothing, Google-esque architecture, you get a highly scalable solution at a very low cost. There is no single point of failure, and features like high-availability are built-in.
And the best part is that our virtual desktops cost less than a PC to deploy - our fully loaded cost (including the server, our software, MS, the hypervisor, and other licenses, thin client) is cheaper than a PC.
We are encouraged by the response we are getting from early trial users on this release. Here is some feedback we have received from beta partners and customers:
"Now I see why you say it's "turnkey". We got the whole thing up and running on multiple servers in just a few hours."
"Neat architecture, solves the fundamental awkardness with VDI."
"My team is raving about your solution."
You can either download a free trial of our single box version here, or register here if you would like to try the multi-box version. We would love to get your feedback, let us know what you think!
Brian Madden: Kaviza a desktop virtualization vendor you don't know, but should
Virtualization guru and blogger, Brian Madden, has written an interesting article on new innovations in the virtual desktop space and highlights Kaviza as an emerging player you should know. Here is an excerpt:
"Kaviza is another software company who says "VDI is too complex." You need your VMs, a connection broker, a web interface, load balancers, databases, etc. And if any one of those components fails, then your whole environment goes down.
Kaviza installs natively on server hardware, building on top of the free embedded ESXi, to create a virtual "grid" that supplies VDI desktops. You can start with a single server and their solution can start serving desktops right out of the box. But they really shine when you add more than one server. You can add additional servers just by loading the Kaviza software and pointing them to the existing grid. The Kaviza system figures out everything else. They ensure everything is redundant, and they build as much of all the components that you need. When you run out of capacity, just buy another server with ESXi on it, install the Kaviza virtual appliance and stand back -- the grid auto-magically grows and configures itself."
