Briforum Day 2: Desktop Virtualization Customer Feedback

I blogged yesterday about how impressed I was by Day 1 at Briforum. During Day 2, I got a chance to roam the exhibit floor and talk with more customers. Two desktop virtualization issues came up repeatedly in these conversations:

• Application virtualization limitations. At issue is the difficulty app virt products have in delivering complex applications, such as those with boot drivers, kernel mode software, and file system filters (e.g. anti-virus, quota managers, printers and print drivers, Blackberry and iPhone synchronization apps, etc.), and the amount of packaging forethought that must be invested up front to allow for interprocess communication between isolated apps. These limitations are pretty well known to desktop virt experts, but it feels like customers are becoming more cognizant of them, and are starting to question whether process isolation/bounding is really necessary to solve the software distribution/delivery problem.
• Sheer number of products needed for “completeness.” One government customer explained this best: “There are 27 vendors exhibiting here, and all have cool products that solve different problems. But it’s confusing for me. It's also becoming apparent I need to put a lot of these products together for my VDI project to succeed. To deliver a great desktop for my end users that’s also easy to manage for my desktop engineering team, I need a virtualization platform to host my desktops and a connection broker to access them. I need application virtualization to distribute my apps, but because app virt can’t support all of my apps, I also need app streaming, which means I now have 2 different architectures just to package and deliver apps. I need a profile management solution to try to preserve user personalization, but these don’t support user-installed apps. To overcome the user app limitation, I could use a workspace virtualization solution, but that defeats the purpose of desktop virtualization, since I still have 2 guests to manage – the image in the workspace and the image on every PC. Then I have to add in storage de-dup to reduce the storage requirements for my VDI environment. And I need a client hypervisor to let my users work off-line, but toggling back and forth between the personal desktop and the corporate desktop doesn’t solve the problem of users wanting to personalize the corporate image.”

I won't claim Unidesk solves all these problems, but we simplify some of this complexity. We can package and deliver any app, including complex applications and virtualized apps, without any limitations on application communication. You’ll still need VDI and client hypervisor infrastructure, but we fully solve the personalization problem, including user-installed apps. We also solve the storage problem before de-dup is needed, by storing one copy of the Windows image and all standard applications, and dynamically “compositing” every desktop using these shared components. And we’ll enable IT to permit users to fully customize their corporate laptop image, without sacrificing any control, so neither IT nor end users have to worry about managing 2 separate images.

We can demonstrate a lot of this now, and look forward to showing this and more at next year’s Briforum, where we plan on having customers with us sharing their success stories.

One final thought, and not sure if the kudos should go to the Chicago Hilton, TechTarget, or Brian himself, but this was the Greenest conference I’ve attended. Recycling bins were easy-to-find, and water was served in BPI-certified, compostable cups made from corn. For a guy who has 28 solar panels on his house and is an early adopter of a hybrid panel for solar panel cooling and domestic hot water, this was a welcome sight!

-Tom Rose
Unidesk CMO