Real-Time Communications and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): Where Is It Today?Real-Time Communications and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): Where Is It Today?

For now, bringing voice and video fully into VDI is still elusive; however, I believe we'll see significant gains in the ability of VDI to support real-time apps at the desktop in the next 2-3 years.

Doug's co-author on this piece is Matt Urbanowicz, sales engineer at N'Compass Solutions.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is the practice of bringing computing resources back into a centralized site such as a data center and providing users with these resources remotely (from "the cloud"). By eliminating the need for each user to have their own PC workstation hardware & software, VDI enables IT organizations to deliver user processing and applications as a centrally managed service--and in doing so, increase desktop security, improve manageability, enhance infrastructure utilization, offer rapid provisioning, increase processing flexibility, and build "greener" IT infrastructures.With these potential benefits, VDI technology is poised for significant growth in 2010 and beyond as organizations grow increasingly impatient with the rising costs and risks associated with PC hardware and software at the user workstation. Reinforcing the point about growth is IDC's prediction that the market for desktop virtualization software will grow to $1.7 billion by 2011.

While VDI shows tremendous promise in terms of desktop management, security, and power utilization; what about real-time communications like voice and video in a VDI environment? Where do soft phones fit in? Is VDI ready for "prime-time" for these real-time apps?

In a word..."almost."

Citrix HDX, Microsoft Remote Desktop 7 and VMware View with PC-over-IP are the emerging technologies to watch. If you dig deep into each of them you'll find some talk about bi-directional audio and softphone support; however, there's plenty of fine print included. What it comes down to is we're dealing with the first iteration of support for robust real-time communications in virtual machines and as you might expect, currently it's still hit-or-miss.

The main factor in determining if you'll get a rich media experience in a virtual desktop is what you're using as your endpoint device. For example, thin client devices typically run a whittled-down version of an operating system such as Windows XPe or a Linux variant. The advantage these devices have is that some compute power resides locally and can assist with encoding & decoding media.

The downside is that now you have an OS (albeit minimal) to manage and patch at the desktop so you lose some of the value of VDI. Ultra-thin, or "stateless" endpoint devices (also called "zero-clients") require no management or patching at all but generally aren't intelligent or powerful enough to assist with resource-intensive compute tasks required by real-time applications such as soft phones and desktop video.

If your user compute profile involves several media applications, you won't get very high consolidation ratios (quantity of virtual machines running on a single physical host server) with stateless devices because they leave all the processing duties to the desktop sources' host server.

The really big gains for VDI performance recently have been with graphics and Flash media, which makes sense because graphics and popular video websites are both where VDI had deficiencies and where the market is leading it.

Real-time communications doesn't currently have the full attention of the manufacturers and their respective R&D teams, but I believe that voice and video in a VDI environment is just around the corner (we're now seeing virtualized voice gaining traction as evidenced by the recent announcement of Mitel's Communications Director (MCD) generic software, vMCD operating on a virtual server platform using VMware's vSphere 4).

One functional area worth highlighting is the contact center. We believe that VDI has tremendous potential value in this environment given the flexibility it brings to administrators with enhanced business continuity, DR, risk management, provisioning, and centralized management as well as for agents with increased mobility, reduced workstation devices, and instant access/no-access.

Conclusion For now, bringing voice and video fully into VDI is still elusive; however, I believe we'll see significant gains in the ability of VDI to support real-time apps at the desktop in the next 2-3 years. In the meantime, we'll be tracking the technology and market to update No Jitter readers as these advancements come to market.For now, bringing voice and video fully into VDI is still elusive; however, I believe we'll see significant gains in the ability of VDI to support real-time apps at the desktop in the next 2-3 years.