Microsoft's vision of virtualization -- Part 2

As promised in yesterday's post, here is part 2 of my summary from the Microsoft Virtualization thing I attended this week, focusing on desktop virtualization technologies and where Microsoft sees them going.

Microsoft has made three significant purchases in the past couple years that focus on the desktop virtualization arena. There was the Softricity purchase for application virtualization, and a new release of that is coming soon (v4.5) as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) that should almost be Enterprise-ready for streaming applications to an existing OS install. More significant than that, however were the purchases of Calista and Kidaro, two companies that focus on performance and functionality for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations.

In the server virtualization space densities of 20 or 50 guests to 1 host are pretty good. But if you're trying to get a VDI implementation for a couple thousand workstations a 50:1 ratio still doesn't meet the needs of most organizations. There is a lot of effort going in to improving the hypervisor performance to meet these needs, but it is not quite there yet. As for the Calista and Kidaro purchases, I now have a much better understanding of what they are all about.

• Calista was focused almost completely on improving graphics performance in the RDP stream. They had made huge strides in reverse engineering the protocol and then leveraging the GPU on the local machine, rather than the CPU, to make graphics performance in a terminal session much, much, much better. With the recent claim by someone from nVidia that the GPU is more important than the CPU in terms of future improvements in system performance, the focus on using the GPU is actually completely reasonable. From Microsoft's perspective the Calista purchase is all about improving the RDP protocol's graphics handling though any means they can leverage. Combining this with the synthetic drivers functionality that I mentioned yesterday where the full feature set of the hardware can be leveraged through the hypervisor, and things are looking up in the graphics arena for terminal services shops. Still, there is some acknowledgement that neither RDP nor ICA are able to provide the full experience of device connectivity, UI and performance that a true VDI solution would require. That makes it reasonably likely that the Calista technology will get rolled into the new super-RDP, whenever that comes out, to make VDI more feasible.
• The Kidaro purchase is a cross between Virtual PC and Published Applications in a Citrix/Terminal Server environment. Kidaro includes both a client and a server component and allows for an application to run completely in a Virtual PC environment on a local PC with the appearance of just a regular local application. Plus, the server component allows for the VHD associated with the app to be managed centrally and distributed or revoked from the console, precluding the need to individually manage the VHDs on all the PCs. So if you have some legacy application or custom code that requires Office 95 to function but you also want to deploy Vista you can build a centrally managed Windows XP SP3 VHD and install Office 95 on it, distribute the VHD via Kidaro to the appropriate people and also provide a seamless UI experience via Kidaro. The effect will be similar to how VMware's Fusion product works with Macs, allowing a seamless window for a Windows app to run inside OS X. For folks who have worked in a terminal services environment and struggled with the seamless versus window-in-a-window UI this is particularly appealing. The Kidaro product will be rolled into the MDOP once it is fully integrated into the Microsoft suite.

Microsoft is also continuing to work with Citrix/Xen on some connection brokering functionality. The Citrix platform has been well ahead of Microsoft on the connection brokering (published apps, load balancing, etc.) and web interface pieces for several years now, so Microsoft is continuing to leverage that, in combination with their Virtual Machine Manager product (more on this tomorrow) and Hyper-V platform. The ability to have individually assigned VM sessions for some users who have special needs or the ability to provide an generic "shared" VM for users with similar needs allows for scalability and functionality similar to a terminal services environment, but with isolation between the users. This all depends on a new approach to "profile virtualization" to maintain user settings. In reality this is just folder redirection, but using virtualization in the name of something makes it cooler, right?

A real VDI solution that scales and provides a rich user experience is still a couple years out, but in certain niche markets, like call center apps, it will happen much sooner.