Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Desktop Virtualization


Many IT organizations now-a-days are looking at desktop virtualization to upgrade their entire approach to desktop management. Today, individual desktops are hard-coded combinations of OS, apps and user settings, and managed one-by-one on an ongoing basis. Desktop virtualization is a solution where one moving part doesn’t have to disrupt any of the other moving parts in order to make a change. It is the concept of separating a personal computer desktop environment from the physical machine through a client-server computing model.

One of the most significant benefits of desktop virtualization is that it gives IT administrators an easy and centralized way to manage employees' computers. Instead of each computer being separate, administrators create just a handful of VMs or VM templates for different roles within a company. For instance, a company may create one VM for each worker in a research and another for each sales representative. These VMs would include not just the operating system, but also any applications and drivers the employee would need. Such deployments work best where many employees need essentially the same functionality

Vendors providing support for desktop virtualization There are large numbers of vendors providing deskop virtualization solutions. Below mentioned are the top among the lot
Microsoft – Microsoft Virtual PC, Remote desktop services, etc.
Citrix -        Citrix XenDesktop
VMware -   VMware View, VMware v Sphere, etc.
Symantec -  Endpoint Visualization

Diagrammatic representation of desktop virtualization
Advantages
1.Simpler provisioning of new desktops.
2.Reduced downtime in the event of server or client hardware failures.
3.Desktop image management capabilities.
4.Secure remote access to the enterprise desktop environment.
5.Desktop Virtualization offers major savings on expending on physical computer systems by easily installing and configuring VMs on a single computer system

Limitations
1.Compatibility – Not all applications can be virtualized easily.
2.Potential security risks if the network is not properly managed.
3.Some loss of user autonomy and privacy.
4.Challenges in setting up and maintaining drivers for printers and other peripherals.
5.Difficulty in running certain complex applications such as multimedia.
6.Increased downtime in the event of network failures.
7.Complexity and high costs of VDI deployment and management

1 comments:

Currently I work for Dell and thought your article on virtualization is quite impressive. virtualization allow businesses to run with fewer resources while providing the infrastructure to meet today and future customer needs.It also consolidates physical resources, simplify deployment and administration, and reduce power and cooling requirements.

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