Despite the extraordinary hype around VDI and the rapidly burgeoning VDI industry, it’s difficult to find sizeable enterprise deployments. Part of the issue is that of the two real contenders in the market, VMware’s View 3 has only been shipping for 4 ½ months, while Citrix’s Xen Desktop represents a complete paradigm shift away from the 98.5% of its sales that are Microsoft Terminal Server based. While it hopefully will pass without much more pain, swine flu unfortunately does have the potential to accelerate deployment of VDI.
Citrix got its big break in 1994 when Novell started referring its resellers to Citrix's OS/2-based remote access product, WinView. As the Citrix technology matured, though, it was not positioned nor implemented as a widespread hosted desktop solution. The limitations of Terminal Server made such an environment more confusing for users and harder to effectively administer. The simplicity of VDI is appealing to users because their virtual desktops have the same look-and-feel as their normal PCs. It appeals to IT administrators because it eliminates the management challenges of an enterprise Terminal Server-based deployment.
As with all big IT changes, though, VDI is taking time to work its way into corporate consciousness as a viable alternative to traditional desktop computing. Just the threat of pandemic disasters such as swine flu may give IT managers an incentive to start setting up virtual desktops for users as a preemptive strike. VDI would let users work from home or other remote locations as easily as from headquarters. As was the case with Citrix WinView many years ago, this could spark many more instances of VDI. The advantage of the new technology, though, is that now IT managers are familiar with the concept and savings of a server virtual machine. It won't take them long to realize that they can achieve much greater benefits by making their remote access desktop virtual machines the organizational computing standard from headquarters as well.
Check out my article on VDI coming imminently on searchvmware.com.
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