In listening to some people you would be forgiven for thinking that corporations are dumping last year’s PCs in the trash in their rush to make room for a future built of smartphones, tablets, and flying cars. It’s a wonderful notion and one clearly resonates with many IT pundits who’ve anointed this dream with the grandiose name “The post-PC Era”.
The justification for this perspective is easy to see.
Last week I posed a simple question on Twitter
#VDI too costly? What would it take to make you reconsider? Double the number of sessions per server? Triple maybe?
Only to be reminded just how strongly sentiment had swung against VDI in favor of the other desktop virtualization alternatives. Going back to the first half of 2009, VDI sparked off an almost unprecedented wave of enthusiasm amongst desktop engineers worn down by the constant battle to retain control of the desktop looking for the magic bullet that could finally put to rest the nightmare of distributed desktop management.
When Teradici first introduced PC-over-IP in 2007 one of the key differentiating factors that was heavily promoted was it’s “Build to Lossless” (BTL) display rendering capability. As marketing messages go BTL was very good, it’s short, simple, it describes clearly what it is that Teradici delivers, and it’s something that’s anyone looking at remote display technology is going to want to aspire to achieve.
The one feature in vSphere 5 that was anticipated above all others by desktop systems professionals was View Accelerator – VMware’s answer to Citrix XenServer IntelliCache which improves VDI performance by intelligently caches virtual desktop storage on local (SSD) storage on the host server. By locally caching shared data most of the storage IOPS are performed locally within the host rather than being written out to data center SAN storage.
Initial reaction to the new vRAM-based licensing scheme that VMware introduced with the announcement of vSphere 5 revealed that a significant number of customers were less than happy with the changes. While some VMware customers escaped relatively unscathed, for one group of customers it was not a question of whether they would be affected by the change or not, just how bad it would be. Sven Huisman who blogs on Virtual Future said what many were thinking in his post XenDesktop says goodbye to vSphere?
As the dust settled on VMware’s vSphere 5 announcement one major question was left unanswered. What exactly was VMware’s strategy for VDI customers who were disaffected by the apparent impact of vRAM calculations on their virtual infrastructure. Early poll results suggested the majority of customers using vSphere to host Citrix XenDesktop, Quest vWorkspace etc. would be migrating to XenServer or Hyper-V rather than face a considerable increase in vSphere licensing costs.
The BrightTalk Next Generation Desktop Summit
VDI implementation makes a lot of sense for many organizations wanting to provide a secure and standard desktop for employees. But compared to other virtualization technologies, few organizations are deploying it. Why? Join this panel as they discuss this question, what VDI is lacking and what needs to happen in order for businesses to adopt it.
The Big BYOD Debate
Smartphones and tablets remain ever-prevalent, and the trend of employees using these devices for business purposes, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned, is on the rise. So Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, and the way enterprise IT departments should handle them, is a topic that generates a lot of discussion and controversy. 
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Cisco Desktop Transformation
