VMware has just released their new VDI solution. VDI; what’s that?
Virtual Desktop Infrstructure can be seen as an alternative to traditional server based computing (SBC) such as Terminal Services and Citrix Presentation Server/MetaFrame. The idea is that you use virtual machines running in the data center that run desktop operating systems. Users of those VM’s will access them using a protocol such as RDP or ICA via an easily replacable terminal device. It has some serious adminsitrative advantages. Anyone running SBC is aware of the driver issues, application silos, applicaitons that don’t like running ina shared environment, minor changes require projects, etc, not to mention the hell of managing user profiles or "flex profiles". VDI says "screw all that", let’s just move the user desktop to a central repository and run it in a similar data center, just with the admin and process execution model that we know that works and is responsive to business needs.
The underlying technology is servers, SAN and a hypervisor virtualisation solution. VMware has ruled the roost here for some time. Microsoft aims to step on their toes with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. These products alone offer you a pretty traditional desktop experience for the user and for the administrators. Sysprep’ed virtual machines are cloned and software is deployed.
You can build on top of this using advanced desktop management (even if they are VM’s) using something like SMS 2003 R2 or SCCM 2007, SoftGrid or whatever your favoured software deployment and desktop management solutions are.
The big thing is linking users to their VM’s, provisioning those VM’s in the first place and providing VPN access to roaming users. How do you do it? Well, you can do it the old fashoined way with lots of technology strung together. It works. We’ve all seen that in the past. It’s better again to use a broker. A VDI broker can provision VM’s as they are required. A user connects to the broker, a VM is deployed and the user is automatically connected to the VM. Sweet! It also can offer VPN connectivity, possibly via HTTPS, similar to what you get from Citrix Access Gateway, a well accepted and strongly recommended remote access solution.
VMware have released their own product, VDM2, in this market. It will obviously garner a strong market share because of the name. Brian Madden had a quick look at it and so-far, so-good. There’s a 60 day eval so that’s one product you’ll want to look at in a lab.
You should also note that Provision Networks has a well recommended solution and that Citrix and Microsoft are also working on a solution to work on Hyper-V. The latter may include Ardence, a really clever desktop streaming solution, that could be used for VM deployment.
Credit: Brian Madden