Welcome to Intelligent Business Transfer
The desktop PC has, for some time, been seen as a commodity product and is still the preferred choice for delivering a computing environment for users. While there have been attempts at solutions to centralise the functions of the PC in recent years, most organisations still need to place a PC on the desk for each user to carry out their responsibilities. However, to date, the relatively low cost of PC hardware has been heavily outweighed by the high cost of PC management and support. The deployment of software updates and patches can be particularly labour intensive and time consuming because of the need to test and validate deployments for a wide variety of PC configurations. Likewise, the lack of standardisation, the need for support personnel to troubleshoot issues in person and on-site support raise costs dramatically. A virtual desktop Infrastructure (VDI) from Virtual DTS eliminates these problems, by simplifying and improving PC management and lowering the total cost of ownership, while providing enhanced service to users.
Using VMware’s virtualisation product range, VMware View delivers a full desktop machine to each user that is hosted within the data centre. Virtual machines are hosted on a VMware ESX Server and bring PC functionality to the desktop. A virtual machine running Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista offers identical, even improved performance, to a physical PC running these operating systems. The end-user device can be an existing PC, laptop, thin client, Internet café or Smartphone. Recommendations will be made for solutions to manage the end-user device connection by user to a virtual machine to enable day-to-day tasks to be carried out.
The business benefits of centralising desktop machines into the data centre include:
- More stringent data protection - All data is now stored in a secure environment, with proper backup regimes. This minimises business risk by protecting corporate information assets and ensures compliance to regulation on data protection.
- Simpler desktop management - The VDI machines are centralised in the data centre reducing the amount of time needed to administer them within an organisation.
- Faster patches and upgrades - Here VDI comes into its own, as it takes just a few minutes to provision a new VDI machine. So when an upgrade, service pack or patches need to be deployed to the desktops they are simply re-created using the ’deploy from template’ feature of VirtualCenter, VMware’s central point of control for managing, monitoring, provisioning and migrating virtual machines. A single template can be upgraded with a patch or service pack in minutes and then rapidly pushed out to thousands of VDI machines.
- Access anywhere - VDI machines are accessed via the corporate network, which can easily extend to the Internet. This means any machine can be securely accessed from the office, from home or other locations as required to support mobile and teleworking employees.
- A streamlined user experience - The VDI machine has Microsoft Windows XP or Vista installed on it. When a user connects to it, that is exactly what they experience – a Microsoft Windows XP or Vista operating system with all their applications installed within the virtual machine. In fact, as the virtual machine is running on server-class hardware, they experience the benefit of faster processing speeds, too. Typically, a virtual machine will run at 40% faster than the fastest desktop, as it leverages server hardware and VMware.
Virtual DTS’s live online demonstration shows how using VDI to host user desktop machines as virtual machines brings an extremely quick return on investment. The solution comprises of 4 elements. Hardware, VMware, Connection Broker, WAN optimisation and creates a very compelling business case for installing VMware. The solution is very low impact to deploy and we also cover how VDI reduces desktop costs by at least 60%.
Virtual DTS offers VDI solutions based on technology from VMware and Citrix, IBM with several other related complementary vendors. We are able to work with you to help you decide on the best way to implement VDI and with our carefully selected solution to give you complete control over your desktop estate.