General VDI Question About Benefits, in the DDI / VDI / Desktop Delivery / Bladed PCs forum on BrianMadden.com

Currently we use a hodgepodge of different desktop systems and brands ranging from Intel Celeron 400MHz with 64MB of RAM to Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 1GB RAM. We use this mix of systems to netboot (over TFTP) a Linux distribution called Thinstation. Thinstation then launches the Citrix ICA client and connects to a full Windows Server 2003 desktop published through Citrix Metaframe 4.0 which is locked down via group policy.

My question is, how does any VDI product differ from what I'm currently doing? I understand that it's truly virtualized for each user but really, isn't it much the same thing? Would it offer performance increases? It seems to be the hot new thing in centralized computing but it seems very similar to something I've been doing here for three years.

Hi,

Yes, VDI is really just another form of SBC computing. The difference is that instead of one Windows instance running multiple user sessions, with VDI you have a one-to-one mapping of each user to a Windows XP instance. There is obviously more overhead with this approach (i.e. less user density per server) because for each user, you have a Windows OS instance running.

Have a look at this article for a discussion of when to use VDI vs. SBC:

http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/When-to-use-VDI-when-to-use-server-based-computing-and-how-the-Citrix-Ardence-dynamic-desktop-fits-into-all-this

However, VDI does offer some advantages over SBC solutions; however, by using technologies like application virtualization (i.e. Microsoft application virtualization AKA SoftGrid - http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/softgrid/msappvirt45/default.mspx), application isolation environments, and XenApp 5's new preferential load balancing, you can mitigate many of the advantages that VDI has over SBC - IMHO :-)

http://blogs.inside.quest.com/provision/2008/06/26/vdi-benefits-over-windows-terminal-services/

Thanks for the responses. I now have a far better understanding of the differences between VDI and my current SBC.

>Would it offer performance increases?

I would suspect quite the opposite in an office LAN based environment.

Cheers, Rob.

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nice to see thinstation in use :o)

 

regards

 

Miles