[THIN] To heck with Virtual Machines... I want virtual logons!

Remember the Virtual Workplace video Citrix showed at Iforum about 4 or 5 years 
ago? It was very Star Trekkish with a guy walking around with a little portable 
computer holding a tele/video conference with people around the world.  He went 
from his office, to his car and then to his home where he plugged into a cradle 
and brought the conference up on his giant plasma TV.  They connected people 
from all over the world.  When the channel got staticy and dropped and then 
came back up, he went Oh never mind we just switched over to a new server. 
   
  Ok that was Citrix's vision of access back then.  Any where, any place, and 
any device.  Fast forward to 2006.  The CPS 4 package has much of this 
functionality.. session reliability for example and application isolation so 
apps don't step on each other. Conferencing built in and more. 
   
  Now stay with me here and I will take you on a visionary dream of mine and 
eureka moment I had last evening in my sleep. (and yeah this happens all the 
time) 
   
  Maybe we are approaching this whole virtualization thing backwards. Instead 
of virtualizing servers and desktops I think we should be virtualizing user 
profile sessions. 
   
  Here is my dream. You know how VMWare has that Vmotion stuff where you can 
move a machine over from one physical server to another and not miss a beat? 
  That is pretty awesome stuff.  I started thinking (while I was dreaming of 
course0 why can't someone come up with a way to have multiple identical servers 
with the same apps loaded on them and an admin tool that can take a users 
entire logon session profile(everything they are doing) and move JUST THE 
SESSION with the profile over to another machine.  And then I took it a step 
further.  It could be automated with a tool to monitor users sessions and move 
ones over that are stressing the CPU over to a less used machine. So instead of 
moving a whole server or machine over just move the user over. This is sort of 
what happened in the virtual workplace video. 
   
  I'm asking how hard can this be to do? Put the entire logon into a "virtual 
session profile"..everything the user is doing.  If the users session slows 
down they get a flag that pops up that Asks if they would like to be moved to a 
less busy server, if they say yes, it saves their session state, tells the user 
to hang on a sec while it moves the session profile over to a new server and 
then restores and restarts the session on the new server. A step further...give 
the user the option to save their session logon state..apps open etc into a 
"virtual session profile" so that the could connect back in days, weeks or even 
months later exactly where they left off. (and it wouldn't matter which machine 
they connect to)  With programs like softricity to hold the basic backend app 
information something like this should be doable.  This is not the same thing 
as virtual desktops...I want virtual SESSION profiles not Desktops!
   
  Such a virtualization method would be way more useful than virtual machines 
because you could do things like create a virtual profile with settings that 
would not be changed and use it across your organization, you could then have a 
flex type of setup that saved session settings and personal files in another 
home storage folder if necessary. 
  The benefits being you never have to reboot a server with users on it, you 
can have way more users on a real server than you can on a virtual server and 
you would have much more control over users sessions as you could set up a 
system to monitor only the ones you want. ...ie.. always make sure that the 
Directors virtual profile is sent to the least busy server. I know some of this 
stuff exists today but this is the panacea I want. Think it will ever happen? I 
do.
   
   
   
   


Jim Kenzig 
    Microsoft MVP - Terminal Services
  Provision Networks VIP
CEO The Kenzig Group
http://www.kenzig.com
Blog: http://www.techblink.com

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