An Advance Face Of The Computer Desktop

Company’s Virtualisation administrator planning a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) have to stop thinking only about vendors, technologies and expense. They also have to stop thinking only about VDI through the perspective of server virtualisation. VDI is simply far away from server virtualisation.

IT professionals looking to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure project must have a strategy for data storage, software virtualisation and must know the importance of desktop users to succeed. The technology that allows company’s desktop operating systems on VMs on on-premises servers is known as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Offerings the same services do the same, but on the cloud, is known as desktop as With DaaS(desktop as a service), desktop operating systems usually functions inside virtual machines on servers in a cloud service provider's data center. All the important support infrastructure, including storage and network resources, also available on the cloud. With on-premises VDI, a Desktop as a service provider streams virtual desktops over a network to a customer's endpoint systems, where end users can access them through either a client software or a web browser.

A lot has been already discussed about the challenges & myths of Virtual Desktop Infra and conclusions are being made on these basis. While these discussions create a constructive thought, they usually tend to scare away new users by detailing one complexity after another. Here's what i think about it:

The company should be ready for a real transformation if VDI has to be adopted. If the intention is to just manage everything as it’s being managed currently localy then most of the challenges & myths being talked about on blogs and online forums may be true. The fundamental change is that VDI is moving control from the end-point to the datacenter.

Traditionally, a lot of discipline has been adopted in datacenter management as most of the control lies with the IT team. Years ago several blogs spoke about how the virtual server would fail and never take off. Questions raised about how hardware was being shared, driver issues, memory allocation, storage, etc. Today, nobody questions server virtualization capabilities; almost every organization has attempted it or is using it on a large scale. Also, comparing speed of adoption of server virtualization to that of desktop virtualization is incorrect. Desktops are tightly integrated with end-users. More than technology, it’s a perception play and organizations should be ready to embrace it.

The efforts and investments which are required for these does not cater to desktop costs, rather they all become part of the information security budget. Isn’t it logical to say that the current desktop is not capable of protecting itself and hence we need to look out for solutions? Why are these costs not attributed to these desktop costs? On the other hand, migrating to VDI brings about 70-80% of compliance without intervention of any additional application or technology. Are we consciously crediting VDI for this? Amazing desktop management tools and solutions do exist today. But even then, the need to manage each end-points still persists. The accuracy of patching, achieving standardization in the hardware/software configuration, application rollout is not an easy task for desktop engineers. VDI brings down this complexity and masks the hardware variation and provides a wonderful application layer that is completely standardized. While patching is still needed in VDI, it does reduce the volume of patching by using the right templates.

The concept of VDI is not exclusive, the logic behind sharing a common infrastructure platform has been around for many years. The evolution of many such technologies like client server architecture, terminal services, application virtualization, etc., are driving the single point agenda of how effectively one can deliver application to the end-users.