Virtual Desktop for BYOC first impressions
A virtual desktop is being provided as part of our Bring Your Own Computer to work program. The thought process is that our users definitely require the popular Microsoft Office applications every day (Outlook, Power Point, Excel, Word). We also require Adobe and have several in house custom applications. All of them will require support from our internal I.T. team. Rather than having to deal with malware ridden personal computers it is much easier to provide a virtual desktop for each user so that the image and whatever gets installed is very closely managed by I.T. It is also more cost effective to get corporate pricing than to provide users with a stipend to get the software or allow them to expense it. This week I was given the opportunity to give it a whirl.
My first impressions were very good.
First test case, connected from within our local area network from my corporate laptop. Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Outlook were started at the same time and all popped up within a couple of seconds. Visiting a couple of websites in Chrome was super peppy. I ran a report in our Business Intelligence system in Internet Explorer and the results were generated almost instantly. Sending and receiving emails was instant. And unlike my laptop Outlook didn’t go into Not Responding with every other click. The full screen mode really felt like working directly on the computer my hands were on.
Second test case, from home. My Internet connection was maxed out at the time from something else. Usually you can’t even get to websites under these circumstances because of too many dropped DNS packets. The VMware application connected without hesitation and I honestly felt no lag. This was impressive. I ran the same applications with the same experiences. This time I monitored system activity. CPU for the VMware software stayed at 0% utilization. RAM maintained around 70MB, climbed up to 300MB for a short period of time, then stabilised at 70MB for the duration of the testing. There was virtually no disk IO. This is definitely impressive.
Third test case, from my Android tablet. It is a Motolorla XOOM which is very similarly spec’d to tablets that have been released recently but this one is almost two years old. With a 1Ghz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM the VMware application launched and connected very quickly. There was a little bit more lag when navigating through applications. It could have been the way I was using gestures to do this rather than an external keyboard and mouse. If you had external display, keyboard, and mouse this could be a great day to day solution. There doesn’t seem to be an option for offline desktop option for the tablets. This would allow you to keep a copy of the desktop locally so that if you are not online and want to plow through some email you could. So using a tablet exclusively for this application may get frustrating if you travel and find yourself without network connectivity from time to time.
The next step will be to test offline desktop mode performance from a laptop. The feature isn’t enabled yet in our environment. This will undoubtedly chew up more CPU, RAM, and most importantly disk IO on a laptop. On the server that hosts the desktop CPU and RAM seems to be powerful and cost effective enough to throw lots of resources at. Disk IO though is what concerns me most. On this laptop disk IO is the weak link. When things slow down it’s because some application is chewing on the disk. My hope is that someone will be monitoring this closely as we add users to the server to make sure that the appropriate number of users are added to each.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Insecurity authored by asdfasdfasdfasdf. Read the original post at: http://stephenperciballi.blogspot.com/2012/10/virtual-desktop-for-byoc-first.html