(October 2010)
There’s a buzz word doing the rounds these days. They call
it VDI in short, which expands to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
Desktops have historically been a physical entity; then what
is it with ‘virtual’ that we hear so often? Well, the crux of the concept
around VDI is to move from ‘physical’ to ‘virtual’. Let’s look at it in detail.
What is VDI?
Imagine your desktop shrinking in size, and the CPU cabinet
being removed from your desk. Stretch your imagination a bit further and
visualize the OS and most of the local applications vanishing in a whisker.
Does it make you cry, “My desktop crashed just now!” No, it has not. We just
gave you a ‘dumb’ terminal that still has the ability to get you connected to
Internet. And, we’ve smartly moved all the above ‘missing’ features to a data
centre. It doesn’t hurt not to know where the data centre is physically located.
That’s because you’ll be able to work on an image of the OS and images of all
the applications that you’re so used to working on. While it does not violate
the licensing agreements with vendors, this model allows you to ‘relax’ in the
sense that you will have limited local issues with your desktop. For your daily
work, you will have to access (through secure authentication) various applications
and storage units which are hosted in the data centre.
Why VDI?
Well, I ask – why not? Migrating from the traditional
desktop settings to VDI makes a strong business sense, and the icing on the
cake is: it pays you back financially. Let’s see how.
Windows 7 upgrade
Consider an organization which has 50 thousand desktops,
each of which needs an upgrade to Windows 7. It would take nothing short of
months to test, integrate and install the new OS onto all the 50,000 desktops;
not to mention the workforce required to support any future OS issues,
post-implementation. What if the OS is made to disappear from all the above
desktops, hosted in the data centre, and an image of the same made available to
each of the desktop users? Further patches and updates would be facilitated
from the single centralized image. And the same system hardware would be more
than smart to support the new OS. Any desktop user would say, ‘wow’!
Disaster recovery and Data loss mitigation
We’re fast moving towards a distributed workforce model. One
efficient way to ensure data protection in this scenario is to control it
centrally. In the VDI environment, all user and customer data is hosted in the
data center, leading to faster data recovery and lesser service downtime. Also
– in the event of temporary service disruption, support staff need not rush to
desktop users.
Users’ data protection
Think of systems whose access needs to be controlled and
audited periodically; or whose data are too sensitive and confidential to move
out of the data center. That is easily facilitated by VDI with authentication
logs that track which user accesses which applications at what point in time. VDI
beats the traditional desktop environment thumbs down in this regard.
Field workers
How often is it that you find salespersons collecting data
from you and then rushing back to their offices to update the same on their
internal applications? Even laptops don’t always save them as they have to face
data loss, system crash and other local problems. VDI says, they don’t need
fancy devices to work on, while they are in the ‘field’; instead provide them
with the basic connectivity that would enable them to work seamlessly anytime
anywhere.
Fast organizational growth
If yours is a fast-growing organization, chances are you see
new employees getting onboarded quite often. Imagine a workplace that equips
them with lower-cost thin clients or re-used legacy endpoints instead of fully
loaded PCs. Such re-used endpoints may not have the capability to run the
latest OS or new applications. By making new employees work on such systems,
you may compromise on the ‘look’, but isn’t ‘less’ more beautiful at times than
‘more’, especially when your capability with lesser resources scales up
manifold?
In the end, users from across business lines and geographies
may share the same hosting environment, but they would work on their designated
profiles. And they care not to poke into others’ domains or profiles.
Someone rightly said, sharing is caring.
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