Atlantis Computing caused a bit of a stir yesterday when it announced the $200 VDI desktop. So I hope I don’t get any into any trouble with Atlantis for saying this, especially as I will be paying them a visit on Wednesday, but you don’t really get a virtual desktop for that much.
Let’s be fair now, most thin clients cost more than $200, so you can’t really expect a full VDI solution for that little. As I have said before
This is marketing. It’s supposed to be misleading
Even so, the Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI solution when deployed on Cisco’s UCS hardware is really rather impressive. This isn’t a pared down system engineered to a price point, this is a blazing fast state-of-the-art desktop virtualization solution on leading-edge hardware at a price that comes in at just about twice the price of a conventional enterprise desktop PC. Only it’s not that simple, it’s not really possible to compare a desktop virtualization solution with a conventional distributed desktop.
I haven’t had time yet to do a detailed cost model of the Atlantis/Cisco solution, but it goes something like this:
The cost of Cisco UCS hardware together with the Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI software comes in at just under $200 per desktop, all well and good so far. Only this is VDI, so you must have a business continuity environment, if you don’t have that and you lose your data center, you’re in big trouble. So let’s call that $400 per desktop. Next you need an endpoint, in previous cost models I specified a HP – t5740 which HP list on their website as costing $429. That’s a one-off unit price, in quantity its going to be a lot less but HP have not shared it’s discount pricing structure with me so I will have to stick with it for now (you are of course free to apply a discount and get a better feel for what it would really cost); that takes the cost up to $829. Then we have our dreaded Microsoft Windows VDA license and our VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop license so let’s say another $350 for s/w licensing and that should be enough to get started. That takes us up to one around $1080 which is less than half what a well engineered VDI solution would have cost last year (my cost model based on the VMware/HP reference architecture puts a similar solution using conventional storage at over $2600 ). Contrast that with the cost of a enterprise class desktop PC at say $570, does this mean that this VDI stuff still costs twice as much and as a conventional PC. Well, that would only be accurate if a conventional PC delivered the same service as a virtual desktop, and that simply isn’t true.
Aside from the minor fact that my $570 desktop PC actually costs quite a lot more than that when you add the application and patch management services, we’re still a long way from apples to apples comparison.
Desktop virtualization allows you to do things that are difficult and/or expensive to achieve with a conventionally managed PC. Setting aside the big-ticket items that force you to consider a business continuity capability, one that incidentally is not available with the of $570 desktop PC (I’ll come back to that in a moment). Remember the last time that your hard drive failed, or if you are like me, the time that you left your laptop on the roof of the car, drove off, then backed up over it, and had to recover from scratch. How long did that take? What about that time when an entire office was hit by some zero day exploit, and you spend all day playing whack a mole as you tried to kill it and restore service. These problems are inconsequential in a virtual desktop environment. How many times have you seen a well implemented out of band desktop management solution that can remotely recover a failed machine that will not boot to the desktop OS? That’s child’s play for desktop virtualization.
The truth is, these advanced features are not to implemented in most conventional desktop environments not because they are not needed, but because they are not well understood. Take that $570 enterprise desktop PC and layer in order management services that come out of the box with any desktop virtualization product, and the scales now start to level.
And that business continuity thing… Well if you lose your data center in a VDI or conventional environment, business continues uninterrupted after all you have a business continuity site, that’s what it means. But if you lose your offices, it’s a different story. With VDI, it’s going to hurt but all your data and all your desktops are in the data center and you can continue to function from home albeit with lower efficiency. However, if you have a conventionally managed distributed PC environment and you lose your offices due to a fire, well that’s it I’m afraid you’re stuffed. Because although you have done your homework and your data center has appropriate DR and business continuity plans, I bet your office hasn’t; and don’t expect Dell to help you out if you pick up the phone and say can you ship me 2,000 PCs overnight please. OK, that’s an extreme example, but it does happen and it happens far more often than you might think. It might not be a fire destroying your office, it could be extreme weather that keeps your employees at home, it could be any one of a dozen different things that separates your workforce from its place of work.
So when you look at VDI, remember that today it might cost a bit more than a conventional desktop, but that extra investment will pay dividends when the shit hits the fan.
Errata: When I first published this post I neglected to include the cost of a license for Atlantis Computing ILIO. I have amended the offending section above.
Errata II: It turns out that I was right the first time, the $200 per desktop price that Atlantis published in the ILIO Diskless VDI announcement did include the cost of the ILIO license. I have confirmed this with the customer reference and have updated the offending section, again.
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