I'm sure we can all agree that VDI has a myriad of complexities as seen by the graphic below:
VMware Graphic
Complexity aside for now, there is a lot of press around virtual desktops like the statement one periodical wrote, "getting rid of everything you hate about your corporate PCs." As a result enterprises are taking a closer look at how desktop virtualization can have an impact on many areas of their organizations as it pertains to their corporate PCs. One of the points, besides does the technology make sense, they are asking, "does "VDI" make financial sense". When you look at the sum of all the parts, the cost of acquisition could be quite high for those organizations that haven't fully adopted virtualization in their data centers. For those that have virtualized data centers the costs are significantly less than the "greenfield" data center, but the real money being saved here is in the ongoing CapEx, OpEx, and as Tyler "T-Rex" Rohrer of Liquidware Labs states, user productivity gains.
A recent IDC whitepaper (which was paid for by VMware) showed some interesting numbers based on customers of VMware View. The study showed that organizations using unmanaged PCs compared to organizations using VMware's View saved an average of $287 per user annually. This was mainly from lower device costs, but $601 was attributed to lower IT support costs. The real interesting part to this paper were the dollars saved ($130) from improved user productivity like faster start-up times, less security issues, etc. Steve Kaplan at By The Bell blog calculated annual savings of $455 for an organization virtualizing 1,000 PCs and laptops as part of a phased approach to virtual desktop implementation. Steve calculated the payback period to be 11.7 months against an investment of $500,000, but also found that by applying the $130 in user productivity savings further reduced the payback period to 9.3 months. More of Steve's analysis assumes that as PCs and laptops are refreshed they are replaced with thin clients resulting in annual savings of approximately $130 per user. While most desktop devices are inexpensive to buy, they are costly to own. Gartner estimates that an end-user desktop might cost you up to $5,386 per user per year to own and operate. Yet another statistic that lends itself to the above analysis is that 5 percent of PCs will experience a hardware failure in the first year of ownership. Using the above 1,000 PCs and laptops this would equate to 50 failures resulting in approximately $50,000 in losses and further piling on the support and maintenance costs which already account for 80 percent of the total cost of ownership of these rich devices.
Microsoft has reported, which again confirms the analysis above, that with desktop virtualization there was:
- a 30 percent reduction in application-related help desk call volume and time
- a more than 80 percent overall reduction in application lifecycle costs
- a four-fold increase in user up-time
One more way to cut some of the hardware costs out of refresh equation is the re-purposing of the existing hardware in today's enterprise environments. This can be accomplished via multiple ways from some software vendors, but we have seen great success in both deployment and management with the
Thin Desktop product available from 10ZiG Technology. If today's enterprises can extend the life of existing hardware, both rich and thin clients, then more cost savings can be squeezed out. Imagine being able to migrate to hosted VM-based desktops, hosted shared desktops (ie, TS/Citrix/vWorkspace) and not worry about additional management of the end point and virtually no driver conflicts. This is significant considering that by the end of 2010 some 350,000,000 enterprise desktop PCs will be replaced.
We have also found that by making sure that a virtual desktop strategy is implemented properly saves an incredible amount of time which equates to a significant amount of money. Here is what we have found in many organizations that have caused more costs to VDI projects:
- poorly organized management structure
- no way to measure success or failure in virtual desktop implementation projects
- failure to understand the end user community
- lack of virtualization expertise. This means, server, storage, network, etc. virtualization
In closing, desktop virtualization can be a great opportunity for IT executives to add on to the significant wins they achieved with server virtualization, if done properly. The ROI is real and achievable, but there has to be a new mindset and initiative from the highest levels within the organization that flows down to the individual groups (desktop and server groups) to execute the strategy to realize the benefits.
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