I’m sure by now you’ve heard all about VDI and why it’s good for you – which is why I want to dig a little deeper and cover some things you may not be hearing enough about: the end-user experience.
For an end user, end-user-computing (EUC) offers a lot of flexibility on what I can use for devices. Imagine I’m in sales, sitting in my office and would like a large screen and a full keyboard to do data entry. But when I go and visit with a prospective customer I’d like to have something smaller – maybe an iPadå¨ or an Android device.
Choosing the device that best suits your situation – that’s a perfect example of what VDI allows you to do. With VDI, your desktops are running in your data center(s) and that display is being screenshot to your devices. Your devices can be re-purposed desktops or almost anything modern using almost any OS since all the IT wizardry happens in the data center
VDI also gives us IT guys the ability to modify the desktop with what we need for a user at a particular time. So whether its operating system upgrades, patches, service packs, applications, anti-virus changes – all those things are done in the data center and those screen shots continue to display on the actual devices. And it’s all without really any software or data or technology sitting on the devices themselves. And for disconnected users I still have the ability to deliver a full operating system in a new and unique way with VMware Mirage and VMware Horizon FLEX.
Now imagine that you’re a big business with two data centers – one on the east coast and another on the west. With VDI, you can actually have your infrastructure split in a way that remote users are redirected and connected to the closest data center while they are both operational – and if one were to fail they connect to the other. This leads to a great user experience with high availability.
So let’s review what VDI does for the end user and the admins and why it’s a good choice for businesses:
- VDI dramatically reduces administration complexity
- VDI offers the ability to do things that you weren’t able to do before
- With VDI, TCO goes down and capability goes up
- With VMware Mirage, you can capture user data, profile user installed apps, and back all that up to the data center – all while managing a full window OS on the device
- VDI lets you easily update images so that users get the latest and greatest every time they log in
- And with VDI, you can inject new applications and deliver those to users instantaneously
Deliver data center excellence with Ciscoå¨ UCSfor VDI ÛÒ watch this video VDI Fundamentals then continue with the rest of the series to see where virtualization is taking us today.
