An interesting post over at Slashdot pointed me over to a Network World story by Mitchell Ashley about how Windows 7 wouldn’t be a compelling upgrade from Windows XP. The interesting aspect is that Ashley goes on to suggest that perhaps the idea of OSes might become irrelevant if you move to thin clients connected to virtualized computers over the LAN.
The future Simon paints is one where these personal and business computing environments are virtualized onto the same computer, rather than intermingled as they are today. Businesses will deliver virtualized full OS plus apps, and stand-alone virtualized apps, to computers that users own. This maintains the security of corporate data and applications, and allows the business to viably deliver a computing environment they manage on computers they don’t. Obviously this vision is in line where Citrix is going with XenServer, XenApp and their newly announced Project Independence, and given my own views about desktop and application virtualization I can see merit in a lot of Citrix’s vision.
While we haven’t seen much of this yet, I believe it would be wise for Microsoft to continue to improve Windows 7 as an easily virtualized OS and a platform for delivering virtualized applications. Microsoft has partially move Live Essential apps into the cloud. As they move Office and other apps online, the OS becomes thinner and thinner, less bloated with applications that entangle themselves into the registry and Windows folder of Windows 7.
You know what, I might be wrong on this – but I don’t see it happening.
This is not to say that thin clients and virtual desktops don’t have their place, but the problem with virtualizing the desktop is that offloading processing to a datacenter means, necessarily, more traffic on the LAN. Individual applications may be run remotely, sure, but operating systems – or specifically the graphical user interfaces of those operating systems – carry a lot of overheard. (If we were all using command line interfaces, the overhead would, of course, not be nearly as great.)
Additionally, companies have been moving more towards having consolidated servers connected to the end-user via the WAN – by bringing the servers closer to the datacenter, you’re also, in effect, moving the users further away. You can have virtualized desktops saturating your LAN, or virtualized servers saturating a WAN, but it would be extremely unlikely that you could have both on the same WAN.
What seems more likely is the use of virtual servers to serve up specific applications – applications that can be optimized to reduce overhead on the network. I just don’t see that happening with XP, nor Windows 7 – perhaps only the next generation – the Microsoft Cloud OS, perhaps – might be light enough to handle virtualized desktops. Then again, a computer’s what, $300 from Dell nowadays? And are you saving that much if you have to get a thin-client appliance for each user instead of buying a general purpose PC?
There have been some worthwhile attempts to do the WAN equivalent of having a cake and eating it too – a number of WAN Optimization vendors are putting in Windows services on the WAN Optimization blades themselves. That is, one of the ways they optimize the WAN is to keep traffic off of it – and one of the ways to keep traffic off the WAN is to take care of Windows services on the branch LAN, before it even reaches the WAN. In a way, it’s sort of the opposite of server consolidation – but since you have to run the blade for WAN optimization purposes anyway, you’re not adding additional hardware or sucking up much more power.
This is pretty much speculation at this point – but speculation is fun, isn’t it? I’d love to hear your comments on this.
No comments yet.