Time is right to consider VDI

If you haven't considered virtual desktop options lately, it might be time to take a closer look. There are a lot of alternatives now and the opportunity might be right, especially if a desktop refresh is in order or you're planning a Windows 7 migration.

Tools available today make it possible to implement just about any flavor of virtual desktop you can imagine, and all promise to simplify management, increase security and reduce help desk calls. John Humphreys, Citrix' senior director of Product Marketing, Data Center and Cloud Division, outlines these options:

* The classic hosted blade PC, a one-for-one swap where a single machine in the data center supports a single desktop.

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If you haven't considered virtual desktop options lately, it might be time to take a closer look. There are a lot of alternatives now and the opportunity might be right, especially if a desktop refresh is in order or you're planning a Windows 7 migration.

Tools available today make it possible to implement just about any flavor of virtual desktop you can imagine, and all promise to simplify management, increase security and reduce help desk calls. John Humphreys, Citrix' senior director of Product Marketing, Data Center and Cloud Division, outlines these options:

* The classic hosted blade PC, a one-for-one swap where a single machine in the data center supports a single desktop.

* Hosted shared desktop, where all processing happens on the server side and a server can support as many as 500 desktops.

* Hosted virtual machine-based desktops, where a VM on a server supports 125 desktops, which involves more customization.
* Streamed desktop, where the operating system and apps execute locally, but the operating system and the apps (or just the apps) are maintained centrally and streamed down when the device boots. You need a persistent net connection for this.

It's this flexibility that leads to rosy predictions about virtual desktop adoption from the likes of Gartner. And companies in certain verticals are already well down the path.

I recently met with two large banking concerns that love the security aspects of virtual desktops and already have tens of thousands deployed. One of them uses the hosted shared desktop approach and views the data center servers as a private cloud, one of multiple clouds that are emerging internally for different use cases. The other particularly likes virtual desktops for its huge call centers. Both have aggressive deployment plans.

Think it won't work for you because of the need for mobility or the fact that users need to customize their environments? There are tools for that.

Wyse, for example, has a slick new netbook client, the X90cw, that comes with Windows embedded and doesn't have a hard drive, and multiple vendors now offer software clients for smartphones. If users need to be able to customize their environments, tools from AppSense and others enable you to preserve things such as browser favorites and other settings when you reload apps.

It would be hard to justify an outright leap to virtual desktops, but it might not be difficult to find situations where you can test the waters, especially if you're planning a desktop refresh or upgrading to Windows 7. On the face of it, the benefits look increasingly compelling.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.