About Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Frequent readers of my blog may remember, that i´m really a little bit hesitant to believe that there is really a technical reason for server virtualisation - at least in the Unix space. As Alec Muffet once coined: Virtualisation is a security feature, not a consolidation feature. But there is one area where the need for virtualisation is more obvious: Desktop Virtualisation. This area provides the right combination: An operating system (Win XP predominantly) not really able to consolidate workloads and the ratio between needed compute power (Office, Web) and provided compute power per Desktop (Quadcore 3,0 Ghz) is just absurd. Thus virtualisation in conjunction with a really thin client (and not these stripped down Linux Desktops) is one of the few really valid business cases for virtualisation in my opinion. Well, Sun has an interesting solution for desktop virtualisation with SunRays and the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. This VDI is short before it´s third major release and it contains many interesting feature like the emancipation of the solution from VMware by the support of Virtualbox on a server or the direct support for iSCSI for the deployment of desktops. It´s a really interesting solution with many facets. To describe them i just want to link to the blog of an expert. In the blog of Dirk Grobler you will find many informations about VDI3.