Bring Your Own Laptop Won’t Help VDI
Posted by Mike Fratto, Editor
January 11, 2011
When I made my 2011 predictions, I didn’t hold out much hope for VDI. I don’t think that the upsides in moving to VDI — fast ROI, reduction in operations expenses, security enhancements, etc. — are enough for IT shops to change what they are doing. And I mean any type of VDI, from the traditional remote desktop that Citrix and Microsoft remote desktop have offered for years, to the newer VDI products that run as virtual machines on a desktop or off removable media, some of which we reviewed in 2009. One of the drivers, as Forrester Analyst Andre Kindness noted on Twitter, is that bring your own computer is forcing companies to VDI. I disagree, not because you can’t use VDI in that situation, if you are going to support bring your laptop then VDI be preferred for company apps, but because the costs associated with supporting bring your own laptop and transitioning to VDI for most companies are too high compared to the organizational benefit that would be gained.
The idea of bring your own computer isn’t new. In the last eight years or so, laptops have gotten more powerful and prices have dropped in the dirt. Most people can afford them and as far back as 2005, Current Analysis research showed that laptops sales surpassed desktop sales. It’s natural to think that in a fashion similar to how IT was forced to support mobile devices like Palm Treo’s, BlackBerries, and iPhones because users were bringing them into the office, IT will also have to support employees personal laptops. In a lot of companies I talked to, mobile devices that connected to Exchange and carried documents were grudgingly allowed, often with no formal support from IT and it didn’t really cost IT anything tangible to let users connect to Exchange. If your company wants you to have a smart phone, in most cases they buy it, provision it, and give it to you. Some companies may actually allow employees to use their own laptops, but I don’t see it being a trend. More like a tolerated anomaly.
There are couple of fundamental issues with bring your own laptops that are unlike the oft compared mobile devices. The first is that any decent IT shop has spent a long time putting in place an environment that ensures a stable and reliable mobile computing platform. That’s the goal, anyway. A bring your own strategy takes an IT process and tosses it out the window because desktop virtualization, running a hypervisor on your own laptop, adds its own complications to desktop stability and usability.
The host OS can adversely affect the virtual OS in ways that can be hard to pinpoint and difficult to resolve. I have been doing desktop virtualization using VMWare’s Workstation and VirtualBox daily for over a year, and at times I have had keyboard and mouse input disappear. I have had the desktop video go blank. I have had installed USB devices disappear. Often times, I wasn’t able to pinpoint the cause of the problem and the resolution was power cycle off the VM and the host. There was one case where a network driver didn’t play well with VMware and caused Windows 7, my host OS, to bluescreen. Not fun considering the lost work and downtime.
That leads me to the second fundamental issue. Any IT admin that has been on the front lines of support knows that once you drop software onto a user’s personal computer, IT becomes responsible for all support regardless of whether software IT deployed caused the problem the user is having. Unfairly or not, you put software on someone’s computer and something breaks, IT has to fix it or explain to someone why it isn’t IT’s problem. As if the latter will go over well. It’s fine to say in theory that a desktop hypervisor running a VM makes a clean separation between the two computers, but in reality, they are tightly intertwined.
Category: Laptop Security