Applied desktop virtualisation: Reg readers speak
Aging desktops and the old car syndrome
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Survey results In November 2010, we polled Register readers to find out where you lot are at with desktop virtualisation.
Some 192 IT pros, mostly from the UK and the US, completed a big survey, which was framed by The Register's research partner Freeform Dynamics and sponsored by Microsoft. The findings are in and fully crunched and so we have commissioned Freeform to produce a study based on the results.
And very good it is too. In the study, we considered common approaches to desktop virtualisation:
- Traditional thin client, e.g. Citrix or Windows Terminal Services
- Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) based on a shared server architecture
- Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) based on a dedicated blade architecture
- Application virtualisation, e.g. through application streaming solutions
- Client partitioning, e.g. with multiple virtual machines running on the same desktop PC
To summarise from the experiences of our readers, desktop virt remains an immature market, but user conversations are moving on from the "why" to the "how" of the technology.
The headline finding is that desktop virtualisation is a natural element of any working practice modernisation and efficiency programme, and provided you cast the net widely enough when looking for benefits, can drive significant savings within the business.
As for our sub-head "Aging desktops and the old car syndrome" ... find out more in our lovely Register report Applied desktop virtualisation. ®
COMMENTS
@DrXym
Ah...cool. One of the few things I had heard about Wayland was it dropping network transparency. "No one uses it, why support it?" I thought that sounded odd.
Not really true at all
There would be nothing to prevent you running a Wayland session remotely. Your remote client would capture mouse / keyboard events and send them over the network to the server. In return it would send back graphics instructions representing the desktop and your remote session would render them. The pipe could be anything, e.g. ssh tunneling.
Fundamentally it wouldn't be far removed from how VNC or NX work right now, except it wouldn't require screen scraping or conflating / discarding X primitives into a more efficient format to do. It would offer choices of how the rendering was achieved - one could imagine a really dumb client would barely any rendering and would receive bitmaps, while a rich client with OpenGL / DirectX would do everything remotely.
That aside, there is nothing to stop someone running X11 over Wayland, just like it happens on OS X, Windows.
Amusing
Just as the world seems to be going back to thin-clients (or VDI or whatever you want to call it), the Linux world seems poised to drop network transparency and force people to use fat-clients (I'm looking at you Ubuntu, possibly Fedora too, and the whole Wayland thing).
*head-desk*
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