One Image, Many Desktops, Effortless Management
Virtual desktops are supposed to be easier to manage than physical PCs. But if you've tried to implement VDI for users who need persistent personalization, you've probably learned that the promise of single image management hasn't quite met expectations. You still need to provision and patch multiple copies of Microsoft Windows. Package and deliver a ton of applications. And when patch failures inevitably happen, you need to pay high service escalation costs to figure out why.
Unidesk's single image management capabilities for VDI make provisioning, patching, and updating Microsoft Windows incredibly fast and easy. Much less expensive, too, since patching with Unidesk won't result in patch rejection. The same is true for your applications. We can package and deliver pretty much anything to your virtual desktops. Even packages you've created with your existing application virtualization solutions.
Image Management Shouldn't Be So Hard
Managing the lifecycle of desktop images has been problematic for IT since the advent of personal computing. Many of the following approaches are used in combination to ease the pain:
PC lifecycle management - These classic tools use agents deployed on every desktop to automate the installation of Microsoft Windows and application hot fixes, patches, and updates. Because desktops are all unique, however, most enterprises find that 10-15% of their desktops reject these updates. Identifying the root cause of patch failures and fixing the problem are costly and time-consuming.
Application virtualization - Packaging and isolating applications using application virtualization is a newer way to deliver applications independently from your Microsoft Windows gold image without having to run installers on every desktop. But, these tools cannot virtualize antivirus, printer drivers, VPN clients, and others business-critical applications that use system services and boot-time drivers. Furthermore, packaging applications with these tools requires complex sequencing procedures. You also need to understand which applications need to be "bubbled" together in case they need to share information.
Image cloning - This shared image approach enables you to create a single virtual parent image for many desktops. Whenever the parent is patched, all the clones are updated, too. This approach works well if you don't need persistent personalization. But if your users need you to sustain their profile changes, user-installed applications, and local data through reboots and base image changes, cloned images won't get the job done.
 | Unidesk blog: Why application virtualization didn’t turn out to be the ‘nirvana’ a lot of us thought it would be. |
Unidesk Provides Single Image Management, Versioning, and Control
With our layering and image delivery technologies, you only have to manage a single instance of Microsoft Windows and a single instance of your applications.
By using Unidesk to independently package and deliver all of your applications, files, Registry keys, and existing application virtualization packages, you can finally put all of your users on the same pristine gold image. You can even create Unidesk layers that remove specific applications, Registry keys, and files from desktops.
Implementing Unidesk simplifies patching, versioning, and lifecycle management tasks. To update an application, simply load your current application layer, install your hot fixes and patches, and finalize. All your changes are captured in a new version of the layer. If you roll it out before it's fully tested and run into problems, simply rollback to the previous version.
VDI Success Triangle
You've learned about Management. See how Unidesk delivers the other two must-have requirements for VDI Success:
Personalization | Management | Storage
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