Desktop Virtualisation is on an upward curve. Increasing levels of tele-working, mobile sales and outsourcing and the need for companies to maintain control over their computing assets and intellectual property held on business desktops have all contributed to the trend towards desktop virtualisation.

Running user desktops (and applications) centrally provides significant value and benefits over the traditional local PC desktop model. These benefits include:- improved security by keeping desktops in secure data centers; reduced management costs through centralisation; and the ability to effectively share PC compute power across many users.

Since desktop virtualisation involves running the PC desktop experience across various networks, a number of important security and performance issues arise, which require careful attention and planning.

Example: NGN requirement for Desktop Virtualisation Project:

• Physically distribute central host PC Desktop/application server and mirrored virtualised back-up server.
• Designate specific bandwidth availability to any group or cluster of end-users in any geographic location.
• Define QoS service levels per cluster per application.
• Encrypt data sent and received from end-user Cluster 2.
• Ensure that network latency does not impact virtualisation capability

NGN service specification:

The central host of applications (A, B, C, D, E and F) is deployed in London. A virtualised mirror of this host resides in New York as a backup server. Cluster 1 of end-users using applications A, B and C reside in Manchester whilst cluster 2 of end-users (application developers) reside in Bangalore, India using application toolkits D, E and F.

Cluster 1 end-users are customer facing and need real-time speed and QoS priority level 1. Cluster 2 end-users are developers needing lesser speed and QoS priority levels, but their data must be encrypted.

Mirror end-user cluster environments to switch to New York server in the event of emergency outage in London data centre.

The network design for this scenario is relatively straightforward and is shown in the diagram below. It requires two VPLS instances/virtualised LANs, is QoS enabled and includes encryption.

Example of desktop virtualisation

 

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