The virtual SPICE of life

Not new to the dance, the perennial wallflower, virtual desktop, is now showing up on people's dance card.  As administrators and managers realize the benefits of server virtualization, virtual desktop is coming to the forefront of the virtual discussion.  Centralized management of the desktop has clear advantages, but until recently desktop virtualization had pitfalls that made it untenable for most shops.  The open source SPICE protocol looks to change the playing field. Late last year, Red Hat open sourced the SPICE protocol they received in the Qumranet acquisition.  This remote presentation protocol is built with a different paradigm than most of the other players in the space: virtual device interfaces.  The virtual device interface provides TCP-based connections to deliver separate pathways for display, input, control and config, audio playback and recording.  As a two way server client protocol, SPICE servers can push load onto the clients ensuring the best and most consistent user experience.  Separate TCP streams allow network admins to use QoS to manage the network flows on a granular level. This sounds like a lot of overhead, so where is the benefit over RDP / ICA based solutions?  RDP / ICA solutions are aimed at the basic business processes like word processing.  These apps are light weight and low screen update, rendered on the server and pushed out to the client.  Heavy graphics workloads like CAD/CAM, rendering or multimedia suffer from that design focus. RDP / ICA solutions usually need special codecs to handle a multimedia stream, often with poor results. Leveraging the local client resources and separating the different potential workloads into different channels removes the limitations around multimedia playback.  Bi-directional audio allows apps like VoIP soft phones to operate seamlessly, a use case that would normally kill a hosted desktop project.  Maintaining data on central servers accessed via a virtual desktop can help eliminate the loss of sensitive data with theft of a laptop. Add in the management capabilities like load balancing across servers, desktop pooling, rapid provisioning, snapshots and a built-in connection broker, and the RHEV for Desktops offering around SPICE is an attractive package. The caveat here, and perhaps the competitions' war cry, is the need to have the local resources to support the workload.  SPICE servers can locally process and push render updates to the client better than RDP / ICA, but the best user experience will come from local processing.  Teradici's PCoIP boasts a zero client resource implementation.  However, Moore's Law applies just as well to desktops as it does to servers.  Powerful PC's are now the norm and no more expensive than thin clients that serve as dumb terminals hooked into a VDI implementation.  There's no need to move to a custom ASIC based hardware solution when you can leverage existing IT assets.  Repurposed laptops can provide a clean room glove box environment where end users can manipulate data while remaining physically separated from the operating environment.