In addition, he said that VDI licence and support costs are “a considerable upfront investment”. Plus, “licensing the virtual desktops with Microsoft’s Virtual Desktop Access (VDA) annual subscription license can be a tough sell to the business” when compared to original equipment manufacturer (OEM) operating system licenses.
Furthermore, “the upgrade to your storage infrastructure required to run virtual desktops and handle the dreaded IO ‘boot storms’ is a considerable investment, because it certainly will involve having to buy solid-state drives (SSDs) and/or a new dedicated SAN with sophisticated storage management software. This investment will not be small.”
Providing disaster recovery for VDI, he added, is something that is “usually swept under the carpet and nobody talks about it.”
Currently most organisations deploy their VDI infrastructure on private clouds, there is likely to be a move to the public cloud as confidence grows. The main benefits of this will be that the corporation will no longer have to maintain their own desktop infrastructure, Karen O’Connor, Datapac
“Your VDI SAN is now a single point of failure for every desktop in the business. In the past you only needed a few spare desktops in case of desktop failures, now you need a second SAN,” said Cunningham.
Key functions
With several issues then still to be ironed out for companies before signing up to a virtual desktop solution, once they decide to take the plunge what are the key functions Irish businesses are looking for? According to McHugh, ease of management and the ability to implement standardisation across the desktop environment remain the major attraction towards VDI.
In addition, he said, for large organisations with a large desktop user estate “there are significant OpEx savings to be had, although there is not CapEx savings”. Datapac’s O’Connor commented that security is “uppermost in most people’s minds, especially given recent high profile attacks.”
With that in mind, she said it’s important that corporate intellectual property stays secure. “To that end, products which allow control over mobile devices are important. These products allow control over devices whereby they can be controlled from a central console.
A challenge for many companies in implementing VDI has been the unpredictable and often high cost of the required server and SAN infrastructure. Though this is being tackled with the aid of hyper-converged solutions which can promise to make these costs much lower and predictable in nature as the infrastructure scales, Francis O’Haire, Data Solutions
“Such control allows the device to be completely wiped in the event of theft. Or corporate data can be removed if the device goes outside a defined perimeter. Access to resources can also be controlled based on the location of the device.”
Seamless
O’Haire also touched on the mobile angle, saying that clients are “demanding a seamless mobile experience from their desktop virtualisation solution”. Accessing Windows on smaller touch-oriented devices can be challenging so the solution needs to make the user experience of interacting with a Windows desktop as effortless as possible, he said.
“Often, the user really only needs access to a specific set of applications while mobile, so making them navigate the full Windows desktop interface on a small screen can add to the frustration. For that reason,” he said, “it is important that the desktop virtualisation solution is extremely good at delivering just the applications without the cumbersome overhead of displaying the desktop as well.”
Richard O’Brien, IT director with Triangle said that more and more businesses are keen to manage “each element of [an] end user computer discretely” including operating system (OS), data, user persona and the end-point device. “Providing each of these elements as a service, combining them at the point of consumption, where-ever and on whatever device, securely, are key requirements identified by businesses,” said O’Brien.
“From and end-user perspective its access to data from multiple sources, combined with applications sourced both internally and externally, on any device,” he added.
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