The virtualized desktop. The marketing message from Redmond can now be heard loud and clear. This is what the folks at Redmond say the next desktop operating system will be. That could be Windows 7 (likely) or beyond. Now it’s true that thin-clients are hardly new. Citrix has been in business for goodness knows how long and before that (and the incarnation of the PC itself) terminal computing was all that existed. However, the new-and-improved future thin client as envisioned by Microsoft is spelled out in an interesting post in the Windows Virtualization Product Group by Manlio Vecchiet, a group product manager Windows Server.
Tomorrow’s thin client will be completely different under the hood, based on the hypervisor, not a terminal emulator (such as Windows Terminal Services). As we know, the old style consisted of multiple users creating individual sessions off a single, shared image of the OS. The new style allows the server environment to be contained within a hypervisor, with the end results for the user quite different. Each user can have a desktop environment that is every bit as customizable as PCs are today, and yet also ultra-portable – able to shift from one access device to another, one location to another.
A lot of this functionality has long been available (Sun’s Sun Ray is just one example), but the level of competition is growing as is maturity. Citrix demoed a version of XenDesktop at Interop, Vecchiet notes, adding that the demo showed it running on Hyper-V and using Microsoft’s remote desktop tool, System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
The sore spot is that hypervisor-based desktop virtualization is not yet particularly scaleable (at least from a Microsoft technology point-of-view), Vecchiet says. It requires more server power than yesterday’s thin-client terminal services. There is also the remote access problem to solve. What happens to the OS when the remote connection fails?
Google and the growing league of SaaS providers envision a different kind of virtualization. In the cloud world, the browser is the application server (if you will), the network is the computer, and the application is a collection of Web services called in and activated at the point that they are needed. This concept, too, has some of the same issues, particularly the one of keeping the user productive, even when the remote connection fails.
The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that never again will the world be treated to another bloated operating system like Vista. Thin is once again in.
See also: Mitchell Ashley’s take on desktop virtualization: Told Ya So – Virtualization On The DesktopBeta of Microsoft’s Hyper-V-compatible virtualization manager expected next week
Guest blog by Network World editor John Fontana:
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