UC and Virtualization: Friend or Foe?UC and Virtualization: Friend or Foe?

The benefits of virtualization in terms of reducing cost and complexity are slowly extending to the world of UC, but communication between server, desktop, and UC teams is essential for success.

For the last several years, Nemertes has tracked the growing deployment of virtualization in the enterprise. This year we report that server virtualization deployment is now ubiquitous with 97% of organizations using it for at least part of their application infrastructure.

Now, desktop virtualization is poised for similar acceptance: Fifty percent of organizations are using desktop virtualization, up from 22% in late 2008.

What's the driver for large-scale virtualization deployment? Cost, primarily. Virtualization adopters report significant savings from reduced hardware costs, simplified administration, and the ability to leverage a shared infrastructure to support multiple applications. There are other factors as well, such as greater ability to expand or reduce resource allocations as needed, and the ability to span virtualization across data centers or even to outsourced services providers for resiliency/disaster recovery needs.

In the realm of UC, virtualization was a foreign concept until recently. Few vendors supported running their UC servers or applications on hypervisors. Reasons given include concerns over latency or prioritization of processes, or the need for specialized hardware for audio/video processing. However, server virtualization is slowly creeping into the UC space. Within the last year vendors such as Avaya, Mitel and Siemens have ported call control and other UC applications to run on virtualized servers (or appliances). In addition, Microsoft supports OCS 2007 on a hypervisor (but not yet for voice/video). I expect this trend to rapidly accelerate in 2011 as other UC vendors deliver solutions for porting their dedicated servers onto a generalized virtualization environment. The net result is that those responsible for architecting and managing UC must quickly come up to speed on virtualization technologies, products, and deployments already underway within their organization in order to realize virtualization's benefits for their UC deployments.

The second area where virtualization will impact UC is at the desktop. As previously noted, desktop virtualization (or "Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)") deployments have exploded, again thanks to the opportunities to reduce hardware costs as well as the ability to simplify end-user support and support a more mobile, distributed workforce. Transforming desktops from a physical device to a metaphorical container for application delivery comes with a different set of problems than effecting the same transformation with servers. Moving from physical to virtual servers is mostly a "black box" operation–hidden from the view of users, generally transparent to them (except, as often happens, when scheduled downtime for maintenance fades to a memory). Moving from physical to virtual desktops involves both direct user experience and all of the IT organization that supports it. The politics, both inside IT and outside it, are different: users commonly associate the importance of their position with the degree of control they have over their desktops--less in a virtual desktop environment, usually, and so leaving them less chance to individualize and to experiment.

Specific to UC, VDI creates an enormous challenge for those deploying softphone or desktop video applications. In a desktop UC deployment, voice/video encapsulation/decapsulation happens in software running on the user's computer. Carrying this voice/video stream back to the data center for processing on a hypervisor isn't practical due to latency and bandwidth concerns. A few solutions exist today such as thin client adapters from Wyse and Citrix’s HDX solution that support localized voice/video processing via USB-connected device. But we haven’t come across very many companies that have thus far deployed these solutions.

Perhaps the bigger challenge is organizationally related--rarely are those responsible for UC desktop applications in close communication with those who actually "run" the desktops. We spoke to one company who scrubbed a 5,000-seat launch of software-based voice/video after finding out that the plans for desktop virtualization didn’t include support for real-time applications. Once again, clear communication between UC teams and infrastructure teams is a pre-requisite for success.

The bottom line: the benefits of virtualization in terms of reducing cost and complexity are slowly extending to the world of UC, but communication between server, desktop, and UC teams is essential for success.