Comments on: VDI - Why You Probably Shouldn’t Care

By: Adam Wylie

Adam Wylie — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 03:27:42 +0000

Yep i was going to raise the same point as gordon in regards to Hardware lifecycle management, for companys that have a large Desktop fleet (1000+ machines) especially if they are geographically dispersed, the logistics and pain around hardware rollouts for EOL equipment would make a combination of thin clients, citrix and vdi very attractive.
As well as the benefits of faster machine provisioning, no WAN utilisation for Updates, or OS deployment and decent prices on thin clients could really simplyfy and streamline user lifecycle management too.
I would love to be able to tie account creation into automatically provisioning a VM for a poweruser.

By: James Kahn

James Kahn — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 22:52:21 +0000

Thanks for the comments guys.

Gordon - I hadn’t considered the green issues of VDI (or Citrix, for that matter). While climate change is a major topic in Australia, we don’t have financial penalties or rewards for how you manage or dispose of your equipment. Power costs are an issue here, although functionality usually trumps any potential savings.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 05:32:27 +0000

I’m underwhelmed by VDI too. Soutions such as Terminal Server are solutions to business issues, i.e. remote access, application delivery and management, centralising data. VDI is a solution to poorly written software.

VDI solves issues that should be addressed by the application developers i.e. software that does not run well in a multi user environment. The onus should be on the developers to write their applications correctly, not the customer to implement work arounds that increase the costs of said software.

By: Gordon Waltham

Gordon Waltham — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 09:22:47 +0000

While I agree with your analysis (we publish apps from a 15 server citrix farm, we also have a VM network and a large population of PC’s 5,000), but if you factor in the green issue’s such as power cost, replacement and EOL disposal of PC’s this can change the cost towards citrix and VDI solutions.

By: James Kahn

James Kahn — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:51:42 +0000

Thanks for the comment Brendon.

Generally for an application such as what you describe I would recommend using an application isolation solution (like Citrix’s AIE, Altiris’ SVS or SoftGrid) to host it on the same Terminal Servers as the rest of your environment. This generally works for most unfriendly applications.

However, like you say, that sometimes doesn’t work. It really depends on the app. If the app is tied to a particular piece of hardware, as many antisocial apps are, VDI isn’t going to help you. Nor is it going to help you if it’s graphically intensive.

VDI will help if the app cannot be isolated and isn’t graphically intensive. You will still need an environment management system to manage your VDI desktops to avoid escalating support costs.

I do believe that VDI has practical use cases - it just isn’t the be all and end all of application delivery environments as many are hailing it to be.

By: Brendon Davis

Brendon Davis — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 23:28:04 +0000

Overall, I agree with the points and conclusion you have raised in your article. I believe there is an important “niche” you have not considered.
For networks supporting 95% of users with Citrix or Terminal Services deployment but having difficulty with a small percentage of ‘power users’ not being able to run specific business related applications that have issues in multi-user environments. Their networks are normally designed and optimised for remote access to a central data store and deploying desktop PC’s for these users counters this design. Especially when dealing with multiple remote sites.
VDI is able to be deployed here to complement the Citrix/ TSE farms and provide the features of a single user environment, while keeping in line with their centralised network design.