VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

With more and more companies outsourcing work abroad or even having their work force located around the globe and many roaming users that want access to their full system as if they where in the office.
IT professionals or facing huge challenge in maintaining client’s desktops and backing up all this dispersed data. For example you are a software company that has just been awarded a new project and you need 10 more developers, these developers needed to run Visual Studio, WebSphere, Full MSSQL and other office applications.
We all know how hard it is to source developers based in one location but if you recruited developers from around the world your task would be much easier other than the fact that you would need to purchase, install and maintain these desktops. The cost of buying the equipment would be high given that once the project is finished it would be difficult to return the machines back to base.
Other solutions would be setting up Citrix Presentation Server Infrastructure which is far too expensive or the VMARE VDI Approach which uses too many system resources for memory storage and CPU.
I recently came across software that would certainly fit the bill for the above solution.
By using Virtuozzo’s virtual desktops you are able to install windows 2003 deploy virtual desktops which are connected via IP using remote desktop you can change the look and feel of the OS to behave just like a desktop.
The foot print of each Virtual Desktop is so small in comparison to VMware as only one host OS is installed and furthermore you are able to share the full resources of the Server between all Virtual Servers e.g. if you installed Virtuozzo on a Quad Core Server with 16 GB of ram each user could use up to 16 GB of ram depending how much other Virtual desktops where using so you could end up with a virtual desktop that is much faster than your local machine.

Management of the virtual desktops is more simplified as you only have one host to manage and deploying different software in each Virtual Desktop is as simple as ticking the package you want each use to have.
This is still a new concept and not widely used but that was the same for server virtualization just 5 years ago not many companies used this technology and know it’s one of the most talked about topics.
There are still several drawbacks that need to be resolved for this to hit the mainstream and become more widely used.

• Firstly thin clients are still to expensive (Most users would be using the personal machine anyway)
• The graphics for multimedia users leave a lot to desire

So for any business that find themselves in a similar situation this is a would be a worth considering as the initial investment is very low compared to other options.

This the latest news in Virtuozzo’s Efforts to make VDI a reality