VDI Taxonomy Comments
Every once in a while I like to post interesting or especially insightful comments from readers. Here's a response from Bert on "
Analyze This: The Flavors of Virtualization":
A decent taxonomy will benefit the whole industry! On the desktop virtualization definition, I would suggest to further subdivide into the two flavors "client-side" (VMware ACE, VirtualBox, etc) and "server-side" (essentially all VDI flavors), as these are typically mixed up sometimes. Also, IDC made a taxonomy of what they call "Virtualized Client Computing" (click here for a graphical overview and link).
Brian Madden recently made a flowchart comparing the Server Based Computer paradigm to desktop virtualization, which is an area I find is also confusing a lot of clients.
Finally, I also like Manlio Vecchiet's definition (Microsoft) for Virtual Desktop Architecture: "the storage and execution of a desktop workload (OS, apps, data) on a virtual machine in the datacenter and the presentation of the UI via a remote desktop protocol (such as RDP) to user devices such as thin and rich clients." This is what I would call "server-hosted" desktop virtualization, and his definition encompasses both the Server Based Computing model (i.e. Terminal Services) as well as Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI).
Thanks, Bert. If any other readers have any thoughts or interesting links, send them my way.
Posted by Tom Valovic on 05/30/2008 at 12:49 PM