Aloha! I was able to duck away for a short holiday in beautiful Kauai. While I was out of the office, our IT folks wanted to do some maintenance on my PC, so I was planning to bring only my Mac on my trip. This gave me a great opportunity to put Wanova Mirage into action.

Quick tutorial for those of you not familiar with Mirage: Mirage centralizes the complete contents of your desktop into the data center (including data, files, personalization settings, and any applications you’ve installed.) This is combined with an IT-managed Base Image, which includes the Windows OS and core applications like MS Office. We call this combination of ‘layers’ a Centralized Virtual Desktop, or CVD.

The CVD is a fully-bootable image and is hardware agnostic. To give me remote access, our admin simply provisioned a virtual machine in the data center, and assigned my CVD to it.

So, while I was sitting on the lanai, sipping a Mai Tai, I was able to securely access my full desktop through our VPN from my Mac using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection. When I returned to the office, my desktop was moved back onto my laptop hardware — complete with all the changes I made while working remotely. Further, I now had an updated corporate image, yet all of my apps (like Photoshop and Illustrator) and personalization were still there. I was back to normal, with only a slight sunburn to show for my travels. All hail the flex desktop!