“Moreover, there is still a lack of clarity on what are the licensing implications of a dynamic environment; where application and OS instances can be processed across many physical servers,” he observes.

“For desktop virtualization, the lack of support for peripherals, such as removable storage media and printers, and lack of user customizability, has limited the scope of deployment to segments where requirements are standardized and do not vary significantly with time.”

Of late, thin client vendors such as Wyse have expanded options in the peripheral support area. Also, key desktop virtualization vendors such as VMware are expanding support for user customization and device support.

The need to be Virtualized
Unlike before, India is today slowly emerging out of its uncertainties and is more than ever trying to be virtualization ready. This is more so because the ease with which a new server, with a given configuration, can be provisioned makes the IT organization more aligned with the demands of business, and specifically to application usage requirements that vary considerably across time and cannot be accurately predicted. Importantly, for testing and development requirements, servers with specific configurations can be provisioned easily.

Desktop Virtualization is rising in demand owing to various reasons, says Somak, such as:

Reducing end point hardware costs: Such as in a call center, where the application requirements are undifferentiated across large population of employees, and instead of a full blown desktop, a desktop environment can be 'beamed' from a server-hosted virtual machine.

Call centre employees require a standardized set of applications and settings. Therefore, an expensive desktop hardware could be replaced with 'thin clients'. Thin clients are much less expensive than traditional desktops to acquire and maintain.

Enhancing security: There are scenarios where centrally managing data is important, because of the sensitive nature of the data. This is true for call centre employees and also true for high value employees such as traders. Data is centrally managed from the server and no data is stored in the end-point hardware.

Convenience for the user or the administrator: Where multiple 'application environments', applications, or desktop environments might be required, which could be mutually incompatible. This requirement has a number of possible scenarios. For example, consider a company that is upgrading to Vista. While Vista offers a number of benefits to the company, certain applications support only XP.