Changes on the VDI Horizon

Based on my many briefings and interviews, it has come to my attention that we are experiencing some significant changes on the world of VDI -- and for the better if they are real.

As anyone who follows this industry can tell you, VDI growth has been stifled by the holy trinity of obstacles: Excessive complexity, high upfront costs and problems associated with shared storage. All three of these obstacles have held fairly steady for the past three years or so since VMware View and Citrix Xendesktop started competing head-to-head and grabbing bunches of headlines in the process.

But all things must change, and now it seems that applies to VDI -- or desktop virtualization as Citrix calls it. These days, I am hearing that the shared storage mess is being cleaned up by companies like Virsto and Atlantis Computing using hypervisor caching and dedupe technology. Solid state disk -- still a mystery to many people, including its vendors -- is also making a contribution by taking the edge off of spikes such as bootstorms. Companies such as Unidesk are also helping the VDI cause via their enhanced management of golden images.

Cost-wise, depending on who you talk to, the cost of a virtual desktop is getting down there with the cost of physical desktop. Dogged by long implementation times, complexity seems to be hanging in there more stubbornly, but if we have come as far as many say we have, there now really may be a light at the end of the VDI tunnel.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/15/2012 at 12:48 PM