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The pros and cons of a virtual desktop infrastructure

Desktops off the Rack

Article from ADMIN 16/2013

By Jens-Christoph Brendel

For years, the replacement of physical PCs with virtual PCs has been touted as a mass movement, but so far, the revolution has not taken place. We explore the background.

At first glance, the benefits of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) seem clear. If you provide virtual desktops, you can centralize almost all of your management tasks on the virtualization server in the data center. That alone offers many advantages. For example, updates lose their terror; after all, you only need to update a few images instead of hundreds of clients.

Conventional software distribution and remote desktop administration are no longer issues. Version incompatibilities and conflicts can be solved at a single point of administration. The processes for providing desktops can be automated to a much greater extent, and backing up user data is much easier because data is stored centrally from the outset.

Virtualization also offers security advantages because you can avoid a dangerous jungle of individually misconfigured operating systems or applications. Hardly anything is stored locally, and the risk of infection is thus zero. Virus scanners or firewalls are not needed on the clients.

You can also dispense with expensive, fully equipped PCs and use inexpensive thin clients that mainly rely on server resources, which in turn achieves more effective utilization. Thin clients also decouple the hardware and software life cycles; never again will new applications force you to buy new desktop computers because the performance of the older generation is no longer sufficient. The thin client, which focuses on input and rendering, is freed from computational tasks and can keep pace over time.

Additionally, thin clients remove some of the administrative load: After a hardware failure, the user simply takes the reserve unit out of the cabinet, plugs it in, and carries on – the admin does not need to be there looking for mistakes and does not need to unscrew the case, restore data from a backup, or reinstall locally. Also, the mean time between failure (MTBF) of a thin client is higher than that of a PC, not least because it has no

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