eWeek - February 1, 2010

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lthough I’m keeping my Mac desktop systems, I’m dumping my Windows desktop system and using a thin client and VMware’s View 4 virtual desktop infrastructure for my Windows needs.

In some ways, this is just a continuation of my Windows desktop evolution, since I’ve been running a Windows XP virtual machine on my Mac using Parallels Desktop for just about a year (for Outlook access to my corporate e-mail account).

The most obvious choice for VDI are large pools of stationary end users, such as a call center or order processing department. But the improvements made in platforms such as VMware View 4 make virtual desktops a reasonable deployment choice for an even wider variety of end-user compute workloads.

The more I use Windows as a virtual machine in a LAN environment, the less need I see for me to have a PC sitting at my desk. And if I worked in a midsize to large organization, it would make even more sense to centralize the desktop infrastructure in a data center. Instead of trying to remotely update hundreds or thousands of desktop systems, the end-user OS and application files could be configured and patched centrally.

However, even as the option to use virtual desktops becomes more feasible, there is an underlying infrastructure requirement that dictates an evolutionary approach to VDI implementation. Though fat-client hardware isn’t deployed to the user in a VDI scenario, there are real hardware resources that must be added to the data center to host the virtual desktop systems.

The next hurdle to clear is licensing. As a reviewer,

‘THERE IS AN UNDERLYING INFRASTRUCTURE REQUIREMENT THAT DICTATES AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO VDI MPLEMENTATION.’

The latest desktop
virtualization offering
from VMware makes
it possible to virtualize
workloads that were once practically immovable
off of end-user hardware. Using its own PCoIP,
I don’t buy the OS and
other client licenses that
support my underlying
infrastructure, and the
pricing for nearly all vol-
ume licensing is a trade
secret to which I am
not privy. But I am con-
cerned with license costs
and provisioning when it
comes to VDI—to say it’s
going to get complicated
is putting it mildly.

VMware enables View 4 to support as many as four monitors. The proprietary protocol also increases the ways those monitors can be positioned (some in landscape and some in portrait orientation), so that graphics-intensive applications can be supported in a virtual desktop environment.

Finally, VDI is by no means the only technology that is evolving as a viable option for providing end-user compute resources. Cloud-based applications from a host of vendors, including Microsoft, are emerging as a reasonable choice for providing business-critical applications to end users without the obligation of providing and maintaining a fleet of PCs (and/or Macs.)

I’m not saying virtual desktop infrastructure is the
be-all-end-all solution for fat-client deployment. VDI still
isn’t a good fit for mobile users or, for similar reasons
having to do with network reliability, for users who
connect over slow WAN links. And there are plenty of
high-value display-intensive apps that aren’t well-suited
All said, I look forward to my virtual desktop expe-
rience. So far, the “instant on,” centrally administered
(albeit by me), super-speedy data center hardware it
avails me is putting a smile on my face. ;