indirect costs.
"Desktop virtualization is a lot like hybrid cars. No one disputes the value and they love the idea, but it is just too expensive to write a check and pay a lot when the traditional version is cheaper and already paid for," Gartner's Margevicius says.
Yet for some organizations the benefits are enough to warrant the investment. For Kevin Nolan, the potential cost, time and labor savings associated with virtual desktops is driving his organization to evaluate the technology. Nolan, manager of systems engineering at Mohawk Industries in Calhoun, Ga., says his company is expanding their use of virtualization technology beyond the 500 VMware virtual servers his group supports. Nolan, who will be speaking at this month's Network World IT Roadmap Atlanta, says adopting virtual desktops would enable his company to extend the refresh cycle on PCs.
"If you have a virtual desktop, you can stretch hardware for more like five or six years, rather than the standard three-year PC refresh cycle," Nolan says. "With a lot less hardware, there are a lot fewer opportunities to break and have to fix machines."
Considering the cost, Nolan says his desktop and server team are working together to evaluate several vendors, including VMware and Citrix. Nolan realizes the desktop realm requires expertise in managing multiple PCs, which Citrix has mastered, but because the technology will reside in the data center and involve the server group, VMware might be a better option.
Analysts say customers could realize price cuts if they did add desktop technology from their virtual server vendor. "Definitely, the more customers buy from one vendor, the more discounts they will receive and the lower the cost per seat could be," Forrester's Lambert says.
For John Turner, desktop virtualization isn't the right move yet. The director of networks and systems at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., says his group evaluated the possibility of extending their successful server virtualization implementation to the desktop and the argument didn't stand up. For one, being a university it would be a challenge to "lock down" a PC image for the majority of students, faculty and others to use. And without solid support for streaming video across the virtual PCs, Turner says he couldn't sign on just yet.
"From a university perspective, we have such a diversity of functions and we can't dictate too much to the end users. And without gigabit to the desktop, performance would be poor," he explains. "We imagined replacing only computers that fail, stretching the refresh cycle, going back to dumb terminals, but we have to also provide what people want with a powerful operating system."
First American's Seitz agrees that many virtual desktops need to be cloned from one golden image, with some changes applied depending on groups. But the majority of desktops incorporate "Microsoft Office and some basic functionality because that is all they need," he says. While First American is using VMware VDI primarily because it represented "the most cost-effective option," Seitz is also realizing benefits not directly related to costs.
"The number of help desk calls drops substantially because they related to hardware and we threw that out, and business continuity plans are more easily implemented," Seitz says. "Auditors are happier that our data doesn't leave our data centers and go overseas. The end user on a virtual desktop only sees a representation of the data and not the data itself, which simplifies a lot of what we do."
Don't forget network, storage
IT managers must also look closely at network and storage requirements in their virtual desktop environment because if they don't, what is already an expensive endeavor will become too costly to continue deploying.
"Typically when doing an ROI against desktops, you don't factor in network and storage costs. You need to break that all down in a per-virtual-machine model," Seitz says. "But storage could be a big cost; shared storage is not cheap."
Storage is a lesson already learned
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