Dynamic Virtual Client

The dynamic virtual client offers thin client advantages with rich client user experience and mobility.

Faster, better, and cheaper.

That’s the steadfast mantra driving many IT organizations to evaluate new technology options. And virtualization is certainly earning its fair share of that attention.

Thin client solutions in particular are securing interest for their potential bottom-line rewards—everything from better performance and easier management to lower energy consumption and reduced costs.

But with all the hype comes some uncertainty, too.

• What is the future of thin client technology?
• Should we invest in virtualization today or hold steady with our existing fleet of PCs and notebooks?
• Will our short-term path prove viable in the long-term or will technology advances radically change the course of that intended path?
• Will end users be able to experience the same client-side performance to which they’ve become accustomed?

Enterprises need to know that what they do today won’t come back to haunt them down the line, so there’s a lot to consider.

The Evolving Computing Platform

Any IT professional can fully appreciate the value of PCs.

Desktop environments offer employees the flexibility they need to do their jobs—for example, downloading role-specific applications as needed. And notebooks provide the mobility they need to be productive anytime, anywhere.

Both are personal in nature, which lends well to the increasingly important balance of work and home life.

True, PCs have been serving enterprises well for years. But the promise of improvement is enticing. And there is, indeed, room for improvement.

The same flexibility that employees cherish creates headaches for IT. Rogue applications contribute to image complexity, making PCs difficult to maintain.

The parade of drivers further complicates that management issue. And the personal data that finds its way to PCs and then to enterprise storage can be overwhelming.

It all makes for a very complex environment that must be kept up-to-date. That mixed collection of images—each with its own operating system, applications, drivers, and data—must be patched, secured, backed up, and inventoried. And when it comes to the traditional PC platform, that’s exactly how costs accumulate.

To that end, thin clients are a compelling alternative. After all, virtualization promises to address all those issues. But what’s in store for thin client technology going forward?

Server virtualization has obviously proven its worth, simplifying data center management and drastically reducing costs. While thin client virtualization is poised to flourish on the coattails of that success, it’s just one step in an evolutionary journey toward the long-term computing needs of enterprises.

The first incarnation of the thin client was essentially an effort to shrink the PC image and run it as just another workload on a server within the data center. That certainly simplifies management and control, but sacrifices performance and flexibility in its wake. What’s more, it hasn’t necessarily proven to be the money-saver it’s been heralded as.

Of course, those limitations can be overcome in time by adding extra protocols. The catch? As thin clients evolve to look and feel more like rich clients, they become thicker and more expensive. And doesn’t that defeat the purpose of virtualization while turning the would-be “super” client into nothing more than a rather sub-par PC?

The same story holds true from the PC perspective. Desktop and notebook systems can be made to look more like thin clients.

In many respects, they’re already heading in that direction:

• notebooks are getting smaller,
• desktops are being equipped with flash memory to offload data,
• and software-as-a-service scenarios are pulling applications from end-user systems.

These are all significant advancements that make PCs easier to manage, but these evolved systems come with their own set of challenges as they become less personal and more inflexible for the user.

The Convergence of Thin and Thick Clients

The real sweet spot is found when those two movements meet in the middle. Coined dynamic virtual computing, this evolutionary step combines the benefits of the thin client and the benefits of the PC all rolled into one.

That is, a rich, high-performing client with a clean image that’s small, mobile, and flexible; a client that’s easy to manage and affordable to maintain.

Some call that a real “work and play” model. But to get there, certain advances are necessary.

Such advances include things like moving the functionality of the hypervisor out of the PC and onto the chip for a smaller virtual machine, and tunneling around the hypervisor to enable higher performance for applications like graphics.

Another required innovation is the ability to accommodate multiple images on a single PC—for example, one container for the corporate image, another for personal use, and still another for IT management.

Not to mention advanced security protocol that looks for what should be running instead of what shouldn’t be running, as is the case with today’s antivirus technology.

In fact, this next generation in virtual computing technology is already in the works. Hypervisors are evolving quickly, and there are encouraging announcements from key industry players touting dynamic virtual computing capabilities that are expected to come to market in the next few years.

The result will be thin clients that act more like PCs, but with all the back-end benefits that come with virtualization, including:

• simplified image management,
• application streaming,
• centralized provisioning,
• synchronized and automated patches,
• and lower total cost of ownership.

A Sure-Fire Path to Client Virtualization

Today, dynamic virtual computing—that illusive state of computing nirvana—may sound like science fiction to many.

With such a long wish list of functionality required to make it a reality, enterprises ultimately circle back to that fretful question: Will our short-term path to virtualization prove viable in the long-term?

In the end, there’s no need to worry. That wish list is already packaged as Intel® vPro™ technology, a set of technologies that can be built into all types of PC platforms—from dynamic devices and thin clients to traditional PCs and notebooks.

So no matter what route an enterprise takes toward virtual computing, it’s future-proofed. No more hauntings by ill-fated decisions made along that twisting, turning path.