Desktop Virtualization

There’s a lot of buzz in business today about desktop virtualization.  And there ought to be.

Desktop virtualization is the process of separating the PC user’s experience from the physical machine.  So the user does everything he or she always did (every legitimate thing, anyway), but is no longer shackled to an aging, occasionally antsy personal computer.

All the user’s programs, applications, data and processes are kept centrally at the data center and accessed from any device capable of running the agent:  a “dumb” PC or laptop, a thin client, even a smartphone.

The groundswell surrounding desktop virtualization is driven by a number of factors.

The economy is forcing organizations to do more with less. Desktop virtualization enables them to utilize older PCs longer (after turning them into thin clients), and avoids the cost of a wide-scale PC refresh. The excitement surrounding the introduction of Windows 7 has created another push. For companies trying to upgrade from XP (or escape from Vista), virtualized desktops provide a means of avoiding the licensing cost of a major Windows 7 migration. (Be warned: There are other licensing fees to be accounted for.) Network-wide hardware expenses can be reduced because resources can now be shared and allocated to end users as needed. Centralized network management generally means less downtime and faster resolution of most network performance issues.