BANGALORE, INDIA: To understand the need and usability of VDI, I'll start with an interesting setup I saw in early 2006. This deployment had nothing to do with VDI as VDI as a concept wasn't there. But they tried to get some functionality of VDI thorugh an innovative, though not so recommended, deployment. The organization I am talking about used to deal with animation and IP (Intellectual Property).

To do away with content theft or leakage, they thought of taking efficient security measures which involved limiting users' access rights; not permitting USB drives, Internet, and CDROMs, etc . Still, there was a probability that someone could actually take out the hard drive or use some such mechanism to take out data (like using a com port modem, etc). So, the IT team wanted to migrate all the machines to the server room, so that they could apply security features of the server room to the workstations.

However, the biggest question was how to give users access to their machines? They migrated all workstations to the server room and laid down the KVM (Keyboard, Video and Mouse) cable across the premises to connect them. This might sound funny, but it actually worked . The benefit was, the users didn't have any physical access to the workstations, and securing the workstations became easier as all were kept at a central location. But certain loopholes remained.

For example, KVM wires are not to be used for such long distances and might cause deterioration in video quality and latency in keyboard and mouse response. At the same time, even if the workstations were kept in a single location logically, they required to manage separate entities for the network independently, such as installing updates, installing new apps, etc.

The right solution for this is to have a setup where all desktops can be hosted in the data center, and logically there would be a single entity where you can just update a single image and take care of all workstations for an entire group. At the same time, one can also stream sessions on a network instead of doing it via KVM lines, and the user can access them using a low cost, low power consuming hosts from their desktop. And this is what Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is all about.

Types of VDI
The oldest form of VDI which we saw was Novel Net Ware remote boot servers, which used to remote boot Windows 3.11 over the network from a Novel Net ware server. This was followed by the not-so popular Remote Windows NT Remote Boot Services, which was used for booting Win 3.11 and Win 95 remotely. At that time, around 12 years back, we didn't call it VDI, even though the concept was more or less similar-managing and virtualizing desktops from the data center (or what we used to call it earlier: the server room).