Something that continues to surprise me is the number organisations who wrongly assume they have to be a “big” IT department to get any value out of virtualisation. – and the recent arrival of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) makes it even easier for smaller IT departments to justify virtualisation 

You know the scenario – a small company with less than a hundred employees, a handful of servers which handle multiple roles each and no IT budget. The one or two person support team handle everything from desktop support to the server infrastructure - office application support through to the company mail server – and the finance package as well.

It’s easy to picture these IT departments seeing the VMware press releases and thinking “Distributed Power Management ... cool ... but we don’t have the budget to buy enough servers that we’d ever need one turned off!” or “Site Recovery Manager ... I’d love to see that but .. well we only have 5 servers that are in the cupboard in the photocopy room, and no DR budget”.

The industry hasn’t really gone out of its way to show these types of organisations how to get value out of virtualisation.

Using today’s cheap, high powered servers this type of organisation can virtualize their entire infrastructure onto as few as two servers (to allow for failover and maintenance period redundancy) – add in an entry level shared storage device, or even an IP based array and you have all the infrastructure required to use VMotion, and High Availability.

Just as importantly a move to virtualisation will allow admins to separate server roles as they no longer need to pay for a new physical server for every service. A file server can be a file server ... instead of a file serving – domain controlling – printer hosting – administrative nightmare. The existing servers can even be used as the virtualisation hosts if they are suitable – further decreasing deployment costs.

BUT ... I hear you say ... the cheapest server we can buy has 8 CPU cores and memory is cheap – so with our 5 servers virtualised our hosts would be grossly underutilised, making it hard to justify the expense!

This is where Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is a fantastic opportunity for smaller companies to increase the Return on Investment of their virtualisation infrastructure.

Instead of deploying hosts with criminally low utilisation rates, utilise the spare capacity to host Virtual Desktops – and stretch your virtualisation dollar further. The administrative staff have been complaining about how slow their Pentium 3 desktops are anyway, so using the free P2V utilities available, take a P2V of the desktops and BAM – in 30 minutes (longer if you forgot to delete the user’s joke email cache) you’ve got a fully functional virtual desktop running on your server infrastructure. Users still use their old PC’s but now they only use it as a glorified thin client to connect to their Virtual Desktop session – and because nothing has changed on their desk, and they still use the same (virtual)PC there is no major environmental change to deal with.

Spend a few evenings of your time wisely and before you know it you could have half the office running virtual desktops, and the other half asking why they’re not!

Next time one of the PC’s die, instead of replacing it with another PC, order that Wyse terminal .. You know you want to. Leave the PC case on the desk and the user won’t even know J. And now that you’re spending less on a Wyse terminal than you were on a PC – it’s easy to justify the US$50 per user license for a desktop broker – and then you’ll really be making life easy for yourself.

VDI is also the perfect solution for getting PC functionality in hazardous environments such as factories and warehouses. Thin client terminals are great solutions for the dusty, hot, cold, dry, humid conditions on the factory floor – but traditionally this has been difficult to do unless you already have a Citrix infrastructure – and deploying virtual desktops allows you to leverage your existing desktop management skills instead of having to learn new processes.

In all honesty – the only significant problem I see with smaller IT departments getting good value out of virtualisation is that they might not already have the skills and experience to guarantee a successful implementation. An investment in a good *cough* consultant *cough* who has an emphasis on knowledge transfer can stretch a long way. Get in touch with the virtualisation vendor of your choice - they’ll be able to give you access to trusted partners who can help.

So next time you hear it – it’s ok – size really doesn’t matter.

- Michael Boots

Michael Boots is a Senior Consultant at Technical Architecture Solutions.