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Server virtualization is well understood these days, but the benefits of virtualization extend beyond the data centre. The next frontier – desktop and application virtualization – is a bit harder to explain to customers, and the business case may be different. But it holds the promise of new revenue streams for resellers, even in uncertain economic times.

Many organizations have already extended their ever-greening cycle on desktops or didn't jump into a Windows Vista upgrade, so there are a large number of PCs out there well beyond their historical best-before date. Customers are faced with planning and budgeting for a full-blown desktop refresh or looking at other alternatives – including virtualization.

The capital cost savings associated with that virtualized desktop infrastructure might not be dramatically different than a full-blown replacement, but the end state is a much more desirable one: complete delivery control, simplified management and the ability to provide disaster recovery.

Organizations are trying to figure out how they can do more with less and use existing equipment as long as they can, and virtualization is the perfect way to do that says Steve Davidek, board director of Connect, the HP user group.

“In my organization, I usually do a replacement every three to four years,” he says of the City of Sparks, Nev. “We're on a five-year cycle right now. Things are starting to break, and we're stealing parts from older PCs trying to make sure we can keep things running until we have the budget to replace our PCs.” Long-term, he believes the better investment would be to set up an infrastructure for virtual desktops (thin clients for the desktop can last five to 10 years because everything is done at the server level).

“I've been trying to get the money to do this for two years now,” says Davidek. “As our budget keeps getting cut – my capital is cut to zero for this fiscal year – I'm probably not going to be able to do much, but if I can show them this is what I need to do to keep things running, I think it's going to help.” That's how he initially sold the organization on server virtualization.

Hardware and software sales are slow, but consulting sales are up, so customers are focused on getting more from what they have says Trent Dilkie, vice-president and CSO of Gibraltar Solutions, an Ottawa-based virtualization reseller that partners with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

It seems like the really big infrastructure projects are being pushed off in favour of optimizing what they've got, he says, and that's played well for VMware and Citrix. In terms of server virtualization, that's really the VMware world. “Everyone's talking about Microsoft's virtualization, but nobody's really doing it in production that I've seen yet,” he says. “We've got a handful of people using [Citrix] XenServer – everyone says from a technology standpoint it's fantastic, but they're still comfortable with VMware because it's the incumbent.” Citrix recently announced it would give away XenServer for free.

Right now, application virtualization is synonymous with Citrix, and several companies have adopted Citrix for problem applications – ones that are otherwise too slow or too complicated to install. Similarly, several use Citrix for secure remote access.

“I don't know of anyone using ThinApp yet from VMware,” says Dilkie. “I know of companies that are playing with it, but haven't deployed it.”

The next frontier – device independence

With application virtualization, you're taking the application off the desktop or mobile device and moving all the data associated with it into the data centre. “I'm running Microsoft Office from our Fort Lauderdale data centre and it looks like I'm running it locally,” says David Wright, area vice-president of Citrix Canada. “I can leave my Lenovo notebook at work and go home, and using the client on the Mac side I'm able to go back into my work environment, so it really provides you with device independence.”

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