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Chris Midgley's Blogs

Will VDI decrease or increase your desktop TCO?
by Chris Midgley on Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 10:17 AM 1 comment, 5045 views

What's the top benefit you expect to get when you virtualize your desktops? I'll bet most of you will say you expect to substantially reduce the cost of ownership. And that makes a lot of sense, as desktop management is one of the largest cost centers in IT. The approach to managing desktops has changed little in over a decade, making it ripe for improvement.

According to Gartner, the total cost ...

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Posted in From Chris's Desktop
Tagged desktop tco, non-persistent, opex, persistent
How many applications have you virtualized?
by Chris Midgley on Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 2:23 PM 2 comments, 2415 views

Application virtualization isn't new.  It's been around for many years, and it's wonderfully useful with VDI deployments.  It solves so many IT management problems - single image management of applications, personalized application delivery, reduction of application conflicts (aka, "DLL hell") and more. 

Then why are most companies failing to virtualize even half of their applications...

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Posted in From Chris's Desktop
Tagged application isolation, application virtualization, Layering
Lock it down and throw away the key!
by Chris Midgley on Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 2:01 PM 0 comments, 1640 views

One of the cool capabilities of Unidesk is how we persist any and all changes made to a desktop, while simultaneously providing single image management of apps and the OS.  The value here is obvious when your desktop use case requires the ability for users to install their own applications, add-ins, drivers, etc.  That's clearly something that non-persistent VDI can't do. 

But just...

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Posted in From Chris's Desktop
Tagged application virtualization, non-persistent, non-persistent desktop, persistent, persistent virtual desktop
When all is said and done, do IOPS really matter?
by Chris Midgley on Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 9:13 AM 2 comments, 4880 views

For some time now, IOPS has been all the rage with VDI, and for good reason.  Understanding how many IOPS your desktops require is a critical component in understanding how to size your VDI infrastructure.  And when using a traditional rotating disk based storage system, it is easy to see why IOPS matter.  At some number of IOPS - typically around 2,000-4,000 - the storage array will...

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Posted in From Chris's Desktop
Tagged equallogic, hybrid, iops, latency
Pushing beyond the limits of virtual desktop density
by Chris Midgley on Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 9:07 AM 0 comments, 6334 views
Note: The article below was published on April 1, 2011 as an April Fools joke.   Unidesk is not developing Quantum Virtualization (at least not right now...!)  Enjoy.

Unidesk was formed a bit over three years ago to bring to market a new approach to virtual desktop management, built on two key inventions.  These inventions - CacheCloud and Composite Virtualization - make it possible...

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Posted in From Chris's Desktop
Tagged deduplication, density, performance, quantum virtualization
An easy-to-use VDI IOPS calculator
by Chris Midgley on Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 9:13 AM 4 comments, 21137 views

So you've heard all about the I/O performance demands of VDI ... but how can you determine what IOPS you will need?  (Read What's all this talk about VDI and IOPS).  While it's best to take detailed measurements, it can be complicated, expensive and time consuming.  What if you just want a ballpark number quickly?

I'm going to show you a quick and dirty way to guestimate your I/O needs...

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Posted in From Chris's Desktop
Tagged calculator, iops, performance, storage