At the recent VMworld conference, there were a lot of discussions around desktop virtualization. In fact, both Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod devoted significant time in their keynotes to the topic. Interestingly, Steve stressed the importance of user experience and talked about differing levels of user experience including a “productive desktop” over the WAN and a “PC-like desktop over the LAN”.

This is a great starting point, but there shouldn’t be a distinction in end-user experience based on whether users are operating over the LAN or WAN. This sort of compromise is what has left many organizations with a bad taste in their mouth about desktop virtualization. Most users’ experience would be severely impacted if they weren’t able to:
- install applications
- work offline
- change settings and configurations

The best measure of user experience is productivity. Is a user more — or less — productive after deploying a particular solution? And not all workers are the same. Knowledge workers may need more compute power, freedom, and flexibility than task workers. IT must also consider other factors that impact productivity: What are the impact of break/fix tasks on the end-user? How fast are desktop restores? Does an end-user need to worry about running back-ups?

When evaluating desktop virtualization solutions, do focus on user experience, but make sure you consider ALL aspects of productivity.