Clearing the fog on desktop virtualization

A sustained buzz hovers around "desktop virtualization," but the technology has yet to set down solid roots in corporations. Despite the protracted hype, vendors have not stepped up to the plate when it comes to meeting enterprise requirements in such areas as infrastructure, storage, security, management and performance, reports Kevin Fogarty in an article at CIO.

A recent report out of the Burton Group looks at the offerings of large and small Virtual Desktop Infrastructure vendors. The term VDI, while sometimes used generally to mean the broad array of desktop virtualization technologies, refers specifically to a centralized, backend server-hosted desktop environment. 

The technology remains expensive, largely because it takes up a great deal of server and other network resources. VDI vendors have been gradually upgrading their offerings, Fogarty reports, but overall the technology remains best suited to small or mid-sized businesses or department-wide implementations.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to separate the hype from the reality when it comes to what desktop virtualization can do for you. For nine insights on cutting through the hype, take a look at a column by Elias Khnaser, practice manager for virtualization at Artemis Technology, in Forbes. 

It is important not to view desktop virtualization in the same light as server virtualization, Khnaser advises. Desktops are more complicated, running numerous applications that have to play nicely together, and this brings its own set of support challenges. "It is a fatal mistake to treat it as server virtualization and go about it without proper planning, assessment and a good understanding of the challenges of such a deployment," he writes.

Of greatest interest, perhaps, is Khnaser's advice that desktop virtualization will not save on capital expenses. It is foremost a boost to operations. It takes less time to deploy applications, and there are fewer failures, he writes.

"What used to take hours and days to provision now takes minutes," he writes. "What used to be a time consuming task to swap someone's physical machine, restore personalized data and configure the machine is now a matter of a few mouse clicks."

Offering another look at how to weigh the pros and cons of desktop virtualization, Eric Knorr at InfoWorld presents a primer on the basic technologies and variations. While the desktops of today may not disappear altogether, virtualization is ushering in a new era of centralized computing, Knorr concludes.

For more:
- see Kevin Fogarty's article at CIO
- see Elias Khnaser's column at Forbes
- see Eric Knorr's article at InfoWeek

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