I had an opportunity to present at a virtualization user group in Montreal this week, and talk with many of the attendees at length. One theme came across loud and clear – after successful deployments of server virtualization, customers are now fully turning their attention to desktop virtualization. Several of the attendees mentioned that they were piloting a VDI solution and they were really happy with it for their local users. Where things started to breakdown was when they added remote or mobile workers to the mix – due to a minor little detail called the WAN.

You see, the challenge that many desktop vendors face (and customers experience first-hand) is they approach the problem from a server or client perspective and they treat the network as an afterthought. That misses the point. With desktop virtualization, the network is the PC bus. And unlike the PC bus running on your laptop or desktop today – which always works – the network introduces all kinds of complexity to the mix, including latency, bandwidth constraints, and even occasional availability issues. When I made this point during our presentation in Montreal, there were a lot of heads nodding around the room. Customers get it. It’s an easy problem to identify but a hard one to solve, and even harder if you treat the network as an afterthought.

Several attendees also mentioned that what was interesting to them was not the hypervisor, but improving PC lifecycle management. People are thinking about how they ease OS migrations given the release of Windows 7. But OS migration is just one aspect of PC lifecycle management that includes desktop provisioning, desktop management, desktop continuity – to name a few.

In retrospect, I’m glad attendees weren’t interested in the hypervisor since Wanova doesn’t require a hypervisor. That would have been a much tougher crowd for us.