In recent conversations with CIOs and IT directors, I have asked many people about their organizations' plans regarding Microsoft's Windows Vista. A few were ready for it and deploying it, and a few more had vague plans to move to it but no tight timeline. Most, though, had neither plan nor timeline for moving to Vista on their corporate PCs; they are pretty happy (or at least comfortable) with XP and see no big upside and lots of downside to making a mass migration.

Why am I discussing this in a data center newsletter? Because of something a few of these folks said they were planning to do: deploy Vista first via virtual desktops. That is, to take the newest, biggest, and most demanding desktop environment around and run multiple copies of it in their data centers.

These companies hope to achieve several goals simultaneously. They would get to use Vista without having to upgrade desktops to support it. Certainly, they might not get the full Vista user experience at first, but they would get much of what they need, especially the chance to begin familiarizing themselves with managing Vista.

They would also get a highly flexible, low-risk way of testing their existing software for Vista compatibility. In a large enterprise with dozens, scores, or even hundreds of applications both off-the-shelf and custom-built, there are bound to be many applications that will not make the transition gracefully, if at all, and some of those applications are bound to be mission-critical.

At the same time, the company would have a test bed for apps that actually need Vista or at least take advantage of it, so they could test replacements for the apps that Vista breaks. All this without having to migrate any users’ actual work environments.

For the data center, the implications are pretty straightforward: As on the desktop, more is needed (more CPU, more memory, etc.) and a lot more is better. Virtual machines running Vista would take more resources than those running XP, so not as many would stack on a physical server or float in a given resource pool. Blade PCs need to be beefier, if that is the route the enterprise wishes to follow, and must be certified for Vista. HP and IBM both ship such blades now, for example.

Judging by the tone of many such conversations, the data center might be not just the first, but also the permanent home of Vista in some companies. The need to make a decision is providing impetus to IT to heat up plans for virtualizing desktops fully and permanently, using multiple technologies and strategies.