As any IT practitioner can attest, server virtualization empowers businesses to become more agile and resilient across the board, from the IT department to the bottom line. The technology transforms bare-metal hardware into a dynamic platform that lets administrators address their users’ needs far more easily and effectively than any traditional solution.
Desktop virtualization brings these benefits out of the server room and into the office, where the personal computer is often the single greatest technological liability. By separating software from hardware, VDI enables business owners to eliminate many problems associated with traditional personal computers.
Lowering Hardware Costs
Virtualizing your desktop environment involves migrating applications, data and operating systems to a data centre where workloads run on servers with small individual footprints. Offloading the computational heavy lifting to your backend environment makes PCs redundant, which means that you can switch to thin clients – the modern-day equivalents of the mainframe era console computer. Thin clients are cheap, have long refresh cycles (five to seven years compared with three for PCs,) and they’re easy to manage, which brings us to the second way in which VDI can boost your business’s bottom line.
Centralized Management
The cost of keeping a traditional desktop running smoothly until it reaches its end of life exceeds the price of machine by as much as 300 percent. VDI eliminates this expense by marrying the cost-efficiency of thin clients with the agility of virtualization, a combination that simplifies maintenance and boosts administration productivity.
User Experience
Desktop virtualization enables administrators to quickly access apps and data, handle security from a single pane of glass, and resolve issues with minimal downtime. These capabilities not only save precious person-hours, but also greatly improve user experience and productivity. In an era when workers are dependent on network access, high availability is essential for operational efficiency.
Work from anywhere
While some applications or email can be used remotely, users need their desktops to access documents, settings and systems. Users with laptops are often stuck out of the office with slow access to files or an inability to access important applications. With VDI, every user has a virtual desktop which can be accessed from anywhere, any time.
Users can access the exact same virtual desktop from the office, from home, from a laptop or tablet, as long as they have an internet connection.
Conclusion
VDI allows desktop administrators to access the benefits that server administrators have had. While it is certainly not applicable in all situations, VDI has the ability to reduce costs and risk while increasing flexibility.
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