Frank Olhorst recently penned an article comparing Citrix and VMware’s approaches to client-hosted desktop virtualization. Frank does a nice job explaining the pros and cons of these approaches. But if your objective is to improve management of your PCs and laptops, while giving users the flexibility to work offline, you don’t really need a hypervisor [...]

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Brian Madden’s recent blog post “Let’s make it official and call it ‘user virtualization’” brings up important points about the need to deal intelligently with user-desktop elements that go beyond just user profile data. However, I think the discussion must move beyond addressing a problem created by non-persistent VMs. User virtualization might be a good [...]

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I had an opportunity to attend BriForum in Chicago several weeks ago (and belatedly found a few minutes to write about it.) There were some really excellent sessions by Shawn Bass, Ruben Spruijt, and many others. In almost every session I attended, the speakers or the attendees discussed how to deal with the complexity created [...]

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Brian Madden wrote a blog post today revisiting his prediction of two years ago that VDI would be ready for wholesale deployment by now, and was contingent on solving four key problem areas. Single disk image for many users Remote display protocols that are indistinguishable from local Local / offline VDI Broader compatibility for app [...]

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Last week, we had a chance to go visit Brian Madden at the TechTarget offices in San Francisco. Ady, our director of product management, and I were planning to do a tag team demo of Wanova Mirage. Fortunately, we are flexible. Brian indicated that he would prefer us marketing types stay away from the camera, [...]

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In the nicely written article, “Zero clients’ promise to replace fat clients but have downsides”, Bridget Botelho points out that while Zero clients promise to improve the manageability and reduce cost for IT, they also have some significant disadvantages. Most notably, she refers to user-experience demands that are in direct conflict with this approach. Tim [...]

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In his recent article on The Challenges of Desktop Virtualization, Daniel Feller comments on how difficult it can be to support non-IT-delivered applications, which can proliferate into the tens of thousands, in virtualized desktop environments. He recommends doing a multi-level assessment to try to figure out which applications are in use, and their appropriate delivery [...]

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Brian Madden – in his typical, non-controversial way – recently posted that “everyone who needs VDI already has it.” He has a point. The reality is that VDI is constrained in its deployment because it was not built to address the needs of remote and mobile users. Existing approaches have forced compromises: server-based solutions provide [...]

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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 [...]

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TechTarget’s SearchVirtualDesktop.com recently published the results of a survey that caught our attention. The survey supports the need for a new approach if desktop virtualization is ever going to realize wide acceptance in enterprise environments. The survey asked exactly the right questions and identifies key pain points that are preventing desktop virtualization from really taking [...]

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