By Jeff Erlichman

Implementing a Virtual Desktop environment will indeed separate you from a “fat client” computing environment. But as with everything, you need a good plan to make sure your “six degrees to separation” comes to fruition.

1. Assess Your Current Situation - Not For Everyone
You have to know where you are to know where you need to go. Assess your current desktop environment, including the application suites. Virtual Desktops are not a panacea; they are not for everyone in your customer community. Take a close look at user profiles. Those that require call center, data entry, email, calendar, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities are prime candidates for Desktop Virtualization.

For your knowledge workers, those professionals who need to use higher level applications, Desktop Virtualization would probably work as well. As a matter of fact, Citrix’ Simmons said 80% of staff could be Virtual Desktop candidates. Only those who have need high computing environments for scientific and research requirements really need to have horse power close at hand to make their applications run.

2. Ask Yourself What You Really Need
Do I need to virtualize the entire desktop and applications suite as in a full fat client? Do I have the server horsepower currently or am I going to have to get newer servers that are bigger, faster, cheaper and can easily handle the local fat/thin client? Ask yourself what “golden desktop” image do I need to provide my user community?

All of these initial moves toward Virtual Desktops need to be part of your plan as well as showing how these savings can be related to infrastructure consolidation efforts.

3. Show The Benefits To Your Managers
For the grateful IT manager, the sheer reduction in IT maintenance costs and time will act as necessary catalysts for the adoption of the Virtual Desktop. Managers will be able to manage more with less – literally. The questions surrounding the growth of “virtual machine sprawl” and obstacles found with “virtual management” are being addressed – and will be solved through a combination of governance practices and software management tools. New dashboards are making it easier for IT staff to manage and support individualized, personalized desktop images all based on that one “golden image”.

4. Implement A Step By Step Plan
You will want a proof of concept. Choose a user profile, test it, make it work and stress it. Find out about scalability. Investigate your network capability for reliability first and bandwidth second.

Network reliability is essential because you need connectivity for your virtual environment to work and perform. Thus your Wi-Fi, LAN, WAN, broadband connections, whatever must be reliable and you need to make sure your network infrastructure can support it. Prove that now in the proof of concept stage.

As you move to the pilot stage, you’ll have to invest time and planning and set expectations of the user group in the pilot.

There are cultural aspects about PCs especially in the government workforce that must be addressed. People are used to having their personal computer with their own personal touches on wallpapers and favorites. You must be able to do that in your virtual environment. You will have to educate and train your pilot group and get testimonials from these “influencers” who can say to their colleagues “OK, this is good or better then what we already have in the way of performance.”

From there you graduate from the pilot phase to the deployment phase where you empower more and more users with virtual access as conditions allow. And they can access their data from their desktop PC, smartphone or PDA, laptop, Netbook or home computer.

5. Use For FDCC Compliance
You can set up FDCC compliant XP or Vista and push it to a thin or fat client in your organization and lock it down so user’s can’t make changes.

The Virtual Desktop offers an outstanding approach to ensuring that Vista and XP are configured in such a way that we are not opening doors for bad guys to get in. Of course that is dependent upon maintaining that same core configuration on all the devices in the infrastructure.

You now have the power to implement a new, single “golden image” of your OS in your Virtual Desktops so that every time a user logs on they see a new pristine image of the OS. It is a ubiquitous and secure way of addressing FDCC, because the user can’t change settings because doesn’t have access to the “golden image”; they only have access to their own personal preferences and files.

6. Embrace The Future
If you still have questions about the Virtual Desktop (and you will), sign up for a free trial of a service such as Go To My PC and you’ll get first-hand experience with the Virtual Desktop experience. Although it is not perfect copy of your desktop, the technology is improving so much that in time the old saying “is it live or is it Memorex”, will be a reality. 

Sources: Government Insights: Incorporating Virtualization into Government System and Datacenter Consolidation Plans: When, Where, How?, December 2008; Citrix; Cisco, Microsoft