The Desktop Motion

Someone somewhere said, "Server virtualisation is soooo cool.  I bet we can do the same for desktops!"

And so began the marketing strategy to sell VDI to the Enterprise.  I think that was about 5 years ago.  Where's your VDI?

Now don't get me wrong.  I love VDI.  I just dont see it as a solution to any real problems the Enterprise has at the moment.  IT professionals are eating up the marketing Kool Aid and implementing VDI against very flimsy if indeed any business case.

What needs to happen first is a culture change towards desktop deployment.  Instead of seeing DD as a stepping stone for the apprentice/student/newbie, a kind of easy fix for finding something for someone with relatively little IT experience to do - change tapes anyone? 

Desktop delivery needs to be valued as I've said before a desktop is how users connect into the infrastructure.  Get this wrong and no manner of technical wizardry in the Data Center will numb the pain.  Too often is heard "I really love the new SharePoint site...when I can get to it"  Ok I was pushing it with SharePoint but you get the idea.

Anyways back on track.  VDI.  Basically if you have a good desktop, by that I mean, UAC is ON, users are NOT administrators, MyDocuments at least is redirected to a network share and you have a solid and reliable build process, MDT for example.  Then VDI could be implemented. 

However pushing VDI past implementation/pilot/IT and into the big wide world is an entirely different noodle salad.

I've been looking at the Citrix XenClient.  This is a bare metal or "type 1" Hypervisor for laptops.  This allows you to have a number of builds on one device.  Obviously the number of VMs is limited to the amount of memory you can cram into your laptop.

As with all VDI I still feel that XenClient is not ready for the main stream user base.  It is a useful tool for an engineer to be able to carry around various builds to differents sites, or for a testing team to check out how things may affect users in different domains by having different VMs connected to different domains but all in one laptop.

I guess I should mention that Citrix also has a server piece in this VDI puzzle which can synchronise the vm desktop back to the server.  Yeah whatever.