Desktop Virtualization: Analyzing its Energy Consumption Impact

Txoojvam Tsav

North central University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction1

Abridged Literature Review4

The Role of Server Virtualization4

Why Virtualization?4

History of Virtualization5

Desktop Virtualization6

Potential Advantages of Desktop Virtualization7

Reduced Hardware7

Reduced Dependence on Legacy Hardware8

Space Requirements9

Energy Efficiency9

Research Problem Statement10

Purpose Statement13

Research Questions14

Hypothesis14

Summary14

REFERENCES16

Desktop Virtualization: Analyzing its Energy Consumption Impact

Introduction

One of the most innovative areas of Information Technology in recent years is the concept of desktop virtualization, which is a concept encompassing hardware and software systems which separates the personal computer desktop environment from the physical machine using the client-server model of computing (Das et al., 2010). Enterprise-level implementation of this technology stores the resulting "virtualized" desktop on a remote server, instead of on the local storage of a remote client; thus, when users work from their local machine, all of the programs, applications, processes and data used are kept on the server and run centrally (Das et al., 2010). This allows users to run operating system on machines throughout the network, thus combining both the advantages of portability afforded by local hypervisor execution and of central image management (Das et al., 2010). The greatest benefit of this technology centers on its superior energy efficiency for both hardware manufacturers and software developers resulting in energy management spanning all levels of chips, operating systems, servers and even applications (Thirupathi-Rao, Kiran, & Reddy, 2010). This study explores various functions of desktop virtualization by focusing on energy-saving strategies developed at hardware, system software and application levels, with an emphasis on energy-efficient servers and cluster systems.

Looking forward, desktop virtualization can be implemented without the server component, allowing smaller organizations and individuals to take advantage of the flexibility of multiple desktops on a single hardware platform without additional network and server resources. Nevertheless, in recent years, there has been low utilization of high performance graphics workstations across a variety of industries, from commercial computers to industrial servers as users are not cognizant of the significant benefits of this technology (Das et al., 2010). These low utilization statistics suggest that workstation consolidation could achieve great savings in infrastructure, networking, power and maintenance costs (Thirupathi-Rao et al., 2010). In addition, less time can be spent on deployment, security and fault isolation without compromising performance (Wang, Feng, & Xue, 2011).

The basic enabler for workstation consolidation in our instructional computing environment is the ability to allow multiple separate operating system instances and associated software packages to share a single hardware server (Das et al., 2010). Since all processing is done at the server level, this allows us to offer high performance graphics workstation capabilities to any desktop, including lower-end commodity class desktop machines, notebook computers, or even thin-clients, with significant benefits in the energy requirements necessary to accommodate such processes (Wang et al., 2011). While server consolidation through virtualization is not new, desktop workstation virtualization seemed a natural and novel extension of the server virtualization framework (Wang et al., 2011). Indeed, the general trend is towards applying virtualization techniques to almost all information technology infrastructure machinery (Das et al., 2010). In this project, novel approaches to desktop virtualization will be analyzed ...