VDI is good for every organization but not every end point!

I attended Microsoft Management Summit 2011 this year (MMS). The event was hosted in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. A great Microsoft event that, of course, showed all the ins en outs about a wide range of new (versions) of System Center products. Besides that, this year MMS2011 also included interesting sessions on RDS and VDI. I had to attend these of course! Thought I'd devote a blogpost on it.

On the very last day of MMS (the day after the closing party) I attended a session called VDI, RDS, TS, Windows 7 – How to Determine and Manage What Your Users Need by Tim S. Benjamin, he’s an Account Technology Strategist at Microsoft. A really good session! Very different from other MMS sessions, less focused on pure technology, but more on functionality and real life examples.

He shows the slide below, that is so basic, but yet so true.

RDS is so much more scalable and manageable then VDI. Users generally don’t care about VDI. Most of the time, they will not even see the difference between a Win7 VDI and a Win2008R2 RDS session. Do you? Below a slide that Tim Benjamin showed. Of course, as admins we know that the slide on the left had the server managent icon in the taskbar, so that must be Win 2008R2. But you have to admit, they look very much alike!

Research results in the following number: RDS have over 5 times more scalability over VDI. Besides that, < 20% of your users actually needs VDI. So can VDI and RDS reside in one environment? Of course! And you should. The following slides show the steps to determine who of your users really need VDI. For other users, use RDS!

So where does that leave VDI? I’m not saying RDS is always a better solutions then VDI. But, and I quote from Tim Benjamin:  VDI is good for every organization but not every end point!

During sessions at MMS, it was also good to see that Microsoft people on more than one occasion mentioned Quest (in particular vWorkspace) to extend RDS or VDI. During one of the sessions I used twitter to announce this extension to the rest of the attendees at that session (MMS offered great support for twitter using session-specific hashtags).  The tweet got retweeted lots of times. I personally have had the opportunity to test vWorkspace. I really like the way it extends the native RDP functionality from Microsoft. So it was good to see Microsoft referred to it as well!

And to conclude, a create quote from Gartner that is very much true as well:

“Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place.”

                Thomas Bittman, Analyst, Gartner