Desktop PCs Today: A Major Management Problem

Desktop PCs today are complex permutations of any number of hardware components, operating system versions, drivers and applications installed by both users and IT staff – along with an ever-growing list of OS and applications updates and patches. This myriad of components are installed on PCs distributed throughout offices and company locations and, even with the best of remote access software, often inaccessible to IT staff without an on-site visit when a critical problem or crash occurs.

Maintaining and managing this constantly changing mix of PC hardware and software consumes more than 70% of the TCO of a typical PC, and it represents the bulk of the help desk workload for many organizations.

Legacy Approaches to Desktop Problems

Past approaches to supporting distributed desktop PCs have typically involved consolidating some portion of the physical desktop PC or its OS and applications from the user's desk back into the datacenter. Virtualization has recently been applied to this problem as it is widely recognized that desktop PCs are only actively used for a small fraction of the day and, as was found with servers, much higher utilization rates, and therefore better return on hardware investments, could be achieved by hosting some portion of a virtualized desktop on shared server hardware.

Until recently, limitations on both the computation power of server hardware and the sophistication of desktop OS virtualization tools had limited use of fully virtual desktops forcing companies to look at virtualizing specific critical applications instead – leaving all of the complexity of a full PC (and Windows OS) out on the user's desk for IT to support.

Now that has changed and the consolidation and virtualization of full desktop PCs has become practical. Recent approaches to desktop consolidation and virtualization taken by different vendors have ranged for traditional thin client systems running a limited form of Windows on essentially a miniature PC on the user's desk to hosted desktop-in-the-cloud software-only services connecting to client software running on a remote PC.

Many of these vendors also provided only one piece of what was needed to deploy real-world desktop virtualization – a thin-client or the server software – leaving customer IT staff with the task of learning, building and maintaining a complex hardware and software integration to get a complete solution – often more work than just supporting the desktop PCs in the first place.

Pano is a clean-slate approach to virtual desktops

Pano Logic has designed a complete and balanced approach to desktop virtualization that sheds the "little PC" baggage of thin client vendors while providing the power and flexibility expected by users. And we've engineered a complete solution with both client hardware and the centralized datacenter tools needed for you to start deploying and working with virtual Windows desktops.

We've engineered the ideal client hardware for desktop virtualization, the Pano Device, specifically designed to leverage today's LAN connectivity, putting just the right amount of hardware on the end user's desk to provide a rich Windows experience without creating an management and update burden for IT.

Pano's Windows virtual machines are hosted on a virtualization layer provided by VMware's industry-standard Virtual Infrastructure, specifically the bare-metal ESX hypervisor that provides the most efficient and powerful way to host and manage multiple virtual machines on a single physical server. Using VMware's hypervisor also frees IT from licensing a separate server OS – only the Windows client OS licenses are needed.

Pano supports native Windows drivers for a wide range of USB peripherals connected to the Pano Device. Using a unique lightweight Windows services component – Pano Desktop Services – the virtual machine display and peripheral I/O are securely and efficiently transferred over a standard IP local area network. Pano's support of native Windows drivers greatly simplifies the IT overhead in deploying and supporting virtual desktops and allows any USB peripherals previously connected to a desktop PC to be simply transferred over to a replacement Pano Device.

Where other vendors have expected customers to learn and integrate complex server-side management tools we've created a simple unified management interface, Pano Manager, to provide you with a complete the desktop virtualization solution, making sure that you can successfully deploy virtual desktops without increasing the burden on already busy IT staff.

You can configure virtual desktops, implement security and access profiles, resolve trouble-tickets, roll-out application upgrades and patches and make backups of user files and OS images all from within the datacenter, cutting time wasted on travel to user's offices and lowering demands placed on peripheral LANs. Pano Manager provides the connection brokering needed to connect Pano Devices to virtual machine instances while support industry-standard Directory Services (like Microsoft Active Directory) to ease integration into existing corporate networks.

To reduce installation overhead and retraining of users moving from a PC, the Pano Device has a single button – the blue Pano Button – that can provide access to a range self-help capabilities unique to Pano – for example, after a system crash or desktop corruption users can immediately get a new, clean virtual desktop allowing them remain productive without any help desk or IT administration involvement. The Pano button is an example of a feature we'll continue to enhance to improve user productivity while also helping IT staff better manage virtual Windows desktops.

Benefits from Pano Desktop Virtualization

Pano's approach to desktop consolidation and virtualization is engineered on these design principles:

• Move all of the software – and the resulting complexity and management workload – from the end user's desk to the datacenter to maximize the benefits of desktop consolidation,
• Deliver a complete solution, including necessary management tools and integration into corporate networking standards, to lower the deployment overhead for IT staff,
• Provide as close to a native Windows desktop experience as possible, including native driver support, to minimize user retraining, hardware replacement costs and productivity disruption.

Pano's approach can provide a 70% reduction in overall desktop costs and containment of security risks at the desktop while giving users a superior Windows experience.

Enhancing the Windows desktop experience with Console Direct

Console Direct™ is protocol enhancement technology introduced by Pano Logic in its latest release, Pano VDS 2.5, announced in November 2008. This technology is the first native VDI protocol that allows a virtual desktop to use native audio, video, and USB device interfaces to deliver a superior Windows desktop multimedia experience over the network including improved video playing with reduced tearing and other artifacts and tighter synchronization between video and accompanying audio tracks (see demonstration video below). These enhancements provided by Console Direct make Pano even better suited for a wide range of usage and overcome some network limitations that have plagued other virtual desktop protocols.

Enhancements in the November 2008 Pano Virtual Desktop Service (VDS) 2.5

• Native Console Support – Allows Windows desktop to use its native interfaces for a PC like experience
• Internet Video – Optimized video experience with no tearing and tight audio synchronization
• Role Based Access – Offers the help desk a read only view into the Pano Manager

	Check out our Podcast describing Pano VDS 2.5 with Console Direct
	How does it work? Click here to see an explanation and Demo of Pano VDS 2.5 with Console Direct