Understanding Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is currently hugely popular and top of mind in most companies; nevertheless, not many companies are actually implementing it. Why? Typically, once VDI is understood and the other options explored, it shifts from being the strategic way forward to a solution for specific subsets of an organization’s population. Personally, I have gone into countless meetings with clients who want to implement VDI, and by the time I walk out of the meeting having explained what it is, what is required, and some other options that offer exactly the same user-experience capabilities, they decide it’s not for them or scale down its planned usage. This is not to say VDI is not a great solution for certain scenarios, but it’s not the global solution it’s made out to be by certain virtualization vendors who don’t have session-based virtualization solutions and so have to push VDI.
Understanding What VDI Means to Users
VDI enables users to have their own desktop operating system instances, which are hosted on a back-end virtualization infrastructure. Users remotely connect to this desktop from some type of client device: it could be a specialist thin client, a full Windows client, or an iPad. Users can connect from anything that has a client that supports the protocol used to communicate with the virtualized client operating system, which for native Windows is the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). This means none of the ...
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