The New VDI Reality

Desktop virtualization and VDI are hot technologies that promised to change the landscape of desktop computing. Yet five years later, we're barely at 5% market penetration—so what went wrong? In many cases the answer clearly points to storage. Often times customers try to replicate the SAN or storage architecture of their virtual servers for their virtual desktops. Or perhaps they were sucked in by vendor promises of "image sharing" only to find out that their desktop users are diverse and that image sharing isn't possible for them. Of course it's not all doom-and-gloom. After all, even though the success of desktop virtualization and VDI is limited, there are still millions of users doing it today. So what are they doing right? How did they approach the storage for their projects?

In this sequel to Brian Madden's book "The VDI Delusion", Brian will dig into how customers are really using and designing storage for their VDI and desktop virtualization projects. He'll look at the promises that were unfulfilled, and, more importantly, the techniques and technologies that are actually working in current production environments. He'll look at when serious money needs to be spent and when you can use the local drives built-in to your servers. He'll address at why SSD doesn't fix the VDI storage issue. He'll examine the emerging "storage-less" and "converged" VDI trends, and he'll discuss how dedupe and single instance technologies really work in the context of virtual desktops.