VDI is the Wrong Approach in this Economy

Real Savings with Virtual Desktops, Virtual Savings with VDI

The economy around the globe has suffered a significant decline resulting in a rippling effect that has touched nearly every industry and every size business. Several economic prognosticators and even the U.S. president have predicted that the recession could last well beyond 2009, but no one can guarantee when our economy will actually turn around. With so much uncertainty, businesses are making decisions to reduce spending and extend the life of existing IT equipment while keeping workforces as nimble and productive as possible. Gartner recently released their 2009 CIO Agenda report that had 1,526 CIO and IT Executives representing more than $138 billion in IT spending responding to their survey. The Gartner survey showed that the top three IT priorities for 2009 were:

1. Improving business process
2. Reducing costs
3. Improving workforce effectiveness

In Enterprise IT, virtualization projects are synonymous with all three of these top priorities. Virtualization is often credited with everything from faster provisioning of new applications and desktops to slashing data center costs with server consolidation to helping companies' with their green initiatives. Broadly speaking, "virtualization" refers to abstraction layers of physical computing resources.  However, let's narrow the focus down to two important areas: servers and desktops.  Today, server virtualization is well understood and is quickly moving into the mainstream.  Desktop virtualization is not well understood and unfortunately is too often confused with one particular approach called VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

Common Approaches to Desktop Virtualization

There are three main approaches to desktop virtualization:

1. Hosted Virtual Desktops (VMs running on virtualized servers accessed by thin-clients also known as VDI) - This approach is ideal for task workers in a shared workstation environment who do not have a need for user-installed applications, offline mobility, or personalized settings. An example might be a part time university administrator who shares his or her workstation with other co-workers. Another example could be a hospital where several nurses share login from various terminals to input patient records that have stringent regulator requirements for data access.

2. Client Virtual Machines (type 1 & type 2 hypervisors) - this approach is ideal for QA/developers for engineering, demos, and testing. Also, Enterprise employees who use Mac & Linux PCs often need to run a second operating system (i.e. Microsoft Windows) in order to gain access to key business applications.

3. Virtual Workspaces (OS/application containers) - this approach is ideal for knowledge workers, mobile professionals, full-time employees, temporary workers, contractors and almost any Enterprise user who requires offline mobility, personalization and full application performance (e.g. medical imaging, automated design, 3D graphics, video/voice intensive applications) from a Windows PC environment.

The reality is that desktop virtualization is much bigger than just VDI. Desktop virtualization separates the desktop software (an end user's applications, data, and settings) from the underlying PC platform which lowers management cost, increases security control, extends the life of existing PC hardware, and provides flexible deployment options.