Realizing the Full Potential of VDI

As Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) - also called Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD) by Gartner and Centralized Virtual Desktops (CVD) by IDC - begins to take root, many analysts are starting to offer market growth predictions. A recent Gartner Emerging Technology Report on Hosted Virtual Desktops estimates that about "15% of the current worldwide traditional professional desktop PC installed base will migrate to HVDs by 2014, equal to some 66 million connected devices."

This strong and growing interest in VDI is due to its potential benefits:

• Reduce CapEx by replacing PCs with cheaper, greener thin clients;
• Improve desktop recoverability by moving desktops from the edge to the data center and backing them up with standard server-class tools;
• Meet security, regulatory compliance, and e-discovery mandates by ensuring desktop data remains in the data center at all times;
• Reduce OpEx by simplifying management - Gold image management, patching, provisioning, and application packaging and delivery.

But, as Gartner notes, there are a number of factors inhibiting VDI adoption, and preventing it from realizing its full potential. In the same report, Gartner points out the following two:

• "Capabilities for managing HVDs remain incomplete, in part because we are waiting for the emergence of convergent management tools (expected to become available in 2H09 or 2010)." In the absence of these convergent solutions, customers aren't realizing the anticipated OpEx savings. As one large Wall St. firm just told me, "I'm still managing VDI like my thick client environment, just in the data center. I've only succeeded in moving the problems off the edge." The image management, patching, provisioning, and app packaging/delivery problems haven't gone away because of the next problem noted by Gartner.
• "There is lack of ability to componentize Windows images and dynamically rebuild them to the last user state. We refer to this requirement as "persistent personalization," and we do not expect it to be fully addressed before the end of 2009." The personalization problems with VDI are becoming widely known. The quick summary is that user-installed apps and add-ins do not persist through Gold image updates when block-based technologies such as image cloning and redo logs are used in an attempt to let users share a single copy of Windows. As a result, IT often reverts to creating full desktop images (20-30 GBs) on expensive, data center-class storage for every VDI user. Not only does this eliminate the "patch once, deliver once" OpEx benefit, but it drives storage costs through the roof, offsetting VDI's CapEx value proposition.

Unidesk is the "convergent management tool" that directly addresses both of these problems (see Change is Coming to PC Lifecycle Management). Unidesk's patent-pending Composite Virtualization™ technology "componentizes" VDI desktops into independently packaged, patched, and managed containers, and dynamically composites the right Windows Gold image, the right set of IT-delivered applications, and the user's own applications, application add-ins, and data whenever the desktop is needed. By enabling all users to share a single instance of the Windows Gold image and a single instance of common applications (restoring the "patch once, deliver once" OpEx benefit and eliminating the VDI storage problem), and by enabling all user personalization changes to persist through Gold image updates (solving the personalization problem), Unidesk eliminates 3 of the factors inhibiting VDI adoption.

Read our recent press release and watch the related video to learn more about how Unidesk Composite Virtualization will help VDI (aka HVD, aka CVD) realize its full potential.

-Tom Rose
Unidesk Chief Marketing Officer