#ITOH Virtualization

Real time notes from IT Optimization in Health Care.

Redhat and Nationwide Children's Hospital and Princeton Health System

Virtualization - Running multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware.

Server Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization

Thee options
1. How to get ready
2. Experiences
3. Desktop - VDI - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Virginia Commonwealth - Wintel 700 server virtualization also storage virtualization

VMWare is the largest usage.

Desktop Virtualization is the main interest. Some pilots.

Why Virtualize the Desktop:
- Lock down
- Security
- Move data back to data center
- Cost of ownership

15-20% of helpdesk calls to replace icons.

Use virtual desktop for app testing.

VDI may help to skip a refresh cycle.

Use XP box as repurposed thin client.

Evaluating VDI Technology:
- Density of sessions on Server side without compromising performance.
- RedHat 65 guests on a 16GB Blade. Use in memory page sharing.
- Storage - thin provisioning. One main image and multiple provisioning files with minor changes per desktop.
- Transparently supporting applications. ISV's are not supporting Virtualized apps. (Red Hat has 1000 ISVs that support virtualization. Red Hat/Microsoft also support each others OS on their hypervisors.

ISVs - Reproduce problem on bare metal and then they talk.

End users want to see it as a transparent experience - to current experience.

- Stable profiles,
- Streaming video
- Multi-monitor support.
- USB support (with security) without choking bandwidth
- USB Policy Manager
- High End graphics support (OpenGL etc.)
- Portable profiles.

VCUMC is piloting a symantec solution for portable profiles.

Desktop pooling. eg. Call Center. Locked down applications. pool of desktop images. Wipe out on completion and re-commission a new image to the pool. Pooling keeps the image set space utilization from growing.

RedHat Licensing based on number of desktops running concurrently.

Latency is more critical than bandwidth in delivering good performance.

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