VDI Is Dead, Long Live VDI-SBC!

Businesscomputingworld.co.uk, 2010/06/18

In Brief:

Desktop virtualisation, also known as VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), is THE technology that everyone is currently talking about. Influential analysts like Gartner, have blazed the trail and laid out the considerable benefits of this approach. These include the fact that operating systems and applications are not directly installed on user desktops but on servers, which means that IT managers can significantly reduce the administration burden of managing individual desktops.

At the same time, the user has the same experience when starting their computer and sees the usual desktop. Nothing changes, but in fact they are actually accessing an image, or virtual “representation” of the system (i.e. Windows® 7). This image is linked to the data-centre where the system is actually hosted. (...)

VDI and Server Based Computing: What’s the Difference?

All this sounds great but there are a few things that are holding back its widescale adoption. (...) Many of our customers tell us that they are hugely impressed by the benefits of VDI technology but have given up after an initial test because they struggled to maintain applications or to reach the same level of service that they enjoyed with their “old” SBC technology. (...)

Is VDI only a flash in the pan?

On the contrary, VDI makes most sense when combined with SBC, where it has two key benefits: the ability for complete desktop personalisation based on the user’s needs (particularly important for certain types of users) – and total operating system compatibility, important for the efficient functioning of certain applications, which can produce incompatibilities when the application is working on the server in SBC mode. (...)

So to sum up: the best approach toward VDI is to virtualise your applications as soon as possible, and then introduce desktop virtualisation gradually in response to your specific needs.

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