Brian Madden wrote a post, wondering aloud if Server Based Computing would come to an end with the emergence of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).
This got my imagination going wild. Regular readers will know I’m working a lot with Hyper-V and virtualisation in general over the last 2 years, both Hyper-V and ESX. I’ve also been speaking a lot about what’s coming up in Windows Server 2008 R2. The one thing I love is the direction that Native VHD is bringing us and the possibilities it could open up – not immediately available in W2008 R2 but it’s a starting point for the technology to mature and gain acceptance.
For those of you unfamiliar with Native VHD: There is a tiny hidden boot partition on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. It controls how the physical machine boots up. You can install a tradition operating system into your C: drive, the second volume or you can drop 1 (or many) VHD’s there. You can edit the boot partition to control whether the server boots up from a normal operating system or from 1 one of the VHD’s. This “surfacing” (mounting to the rest of the world) of a VHD give you a very flexible physical infrastructure and an agile logical machine infrastructure with near raw physical performance. It is not traditional virtualisation because only one operating system will run at one time.
Note: I’ve been reliably told you can configure a Hyper-V parent partition to use Native VHD. I’ve not tried it but it sounds feasible.
With W2008 R2 Windows Deployment Services, you’ll be able to deploy a pre-canned and sysprepped VHD to machines as an alternative way to deploy operating systems. This is probably only the start of the eventual MS adoption of VHD as their image format of choice.
This opens up all sorts of possibilities beyond Windows Server 2008 R2. You could have seamless P2V and V2P. What if an application only need physical performance 2 out of every 12 months? Just “Live Migrate” the thing over to dedicated hardware to boot the hardware from VHD. Then reverse it back again. The driver side of things would need to be figured out – a Hyper-V VM using the VSC-VSP connection via the VM Bus to access the physical hardware drivers in the parent partition. That’s not there with Native VHD.
I had another brain fart while reading Brian’s article. Why not do something similar with VDI clients that are laptops? It’s be a variant of SoftGrid or App-V. A user logs into a VM running on Hyper-V that is running Windows 7 (or Windows 8) client OS. The user has a laptop and wants a roaming computing environment, event when there’s no Internet access. They could subscribe to the VM and download it to a laptop. At this point there could be some sort of synchronisation between the Hyper-V farm and the laptop.
The limits of how you can use this technology is really controlled by the imagination of solution developers. MS has given us the start of something very agile and very powerful. We’re sure to see some interesting betas hit the streets in around 2 years.