Unidesk brings success
to VDI projects
REVIEW: Unidesk’s innovative platform greatly simplifies virtual desktop
infrastructure management and deployment for both VMware View and
Citrix XenDesktop.
By Frank Ohlhorst
Version 1.0 of Unidesk’s elf-named VDI manage- ment tool enables organi- zations that are deploying
virtual desktop infrastructure to take
advantage of the centralized management perks of VDI without sacrificing the individual desktop flexibility that users have come to expect
from traditional, locally installed
operating systems.
With Unidesk 1.0, administrators
can dynamically provision virtual
desktops upon user request by using
a layering methodology to build a
virtual desktop that incorporates an
operating system, applications and
user personalization settings. The
personalization settings allow users
to preserve their settings, while also
installing local applications, storing .pst files and keeping registry
changes.
In the past, typical VDI deploy-
ments forced users to share a
common OS image, eliminating
the ability to personalize their
desktops. To offer personaliza-
tion, administrators would have
to maintain every virtual machine
separately, requiring massive
amounts of storage. Worse yet,
each of those virtual desktops
istrators to patch or upgrade hun-
dreds of virtual PCs just by work-
ing with those master images.
The personalization layer for each
user is stored in a relatively small
file, which further reduces storage
needs.
The net result is a VDI imple-
mentation that requires a fraction
of the storage space used by a tra-
ditional VDI installation that offers
personalization. Unidesk claims that
organizations will see a reduction in
would have to be managed sepa-
rately, meaning that upgrades,
patches and other changes would
have to be applied to hundreds of
different desktops, eliminating
one of the primary advantages of
VDI: simplified OS maintenance.
By layering the OS and appli-
cation levels, Unidesk requires
only master images of the OS and
applications to be stored, which
significantly reduces storage
requirements and allows admin-
Compose desktops from picklists of Windows and application layers.
