New desktop, new DV strategy

With the economy looking a little rosier, companies are coming round to upgrades that have been on hold for longer than usual. As they refresh the corporate desktop, should they be looking at desktop virtualisation too? Mark Bowker, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, thinks IT decision-makers can minimise headaches and …

[Chris Miller]

I understand that virtualisation is the new 'black'

But please stop referring to this technology as 'Desktop Virtualisation'. How am I then to describe running VMware on a desktop to emulate multiple environments (very useful for demos and development work generally)? Can we please stick to Remote/Terminal services (as Microsoft does)?

Whatever we call it, it's generally a great idea, with benefits including cost savings, improved security and the ability to (securely) access your desktop from anywhere (and almost any device) with Internet connectivity. The main drawback is that some (generally older) apps may struggle to work.

[The Cube]

Don't forget to budget

For the increase in your power bill after you put all the desktops in the data centre. Even if you buy 1W thin clients your total power cost is likely to go up in addition to the identified additional capital budget for servers and data centre capacity.

It was nice, by the way, to read an article which, for once, didn't claim that desktop buzzword was green, thanks for that.

[Ammaross Danan]

Overlooks

Of course, this whole mess overlooks the management of the client desktop that is used to connect to all these remote service desktops. Basically say +1 to Win7 licensing per client, too.

[Tezfair]

no real point

I have a couple of clients that are running Virtual Server 2005 with a handful of XP desktops hanging off it. They are great for the remote users to log into and they have their own dedicated XP, however in terms of the article I see not point at all in VMing the whole work place.

You still need to have an OS on a PC which is still consuming power. The more you load up a server the more likely your going to run out of resources.

And what happens if the VM crashes? no point in rebooting your local PC to log back into a hanging PC.

Bit like the cloud. Lets virtualise our servers and host all our data else where and then when our broadband stops working we're fooked.

Visualizing gone mad