In-depth

White paper: Everything you need to know about desktop virtualisation

If you’re seriously thinking about desktop virtualisation within your business, Steve Cassidy summarises the benefits, the pitfalls and how to ensure your deployment succeeds.

14 Jul 2011

Think of desktop virtualisation as a superhero. That's not to say the software arrives in Lycra with a flowing cape more that when the broad and accumulated spread of software within your organisation stops feeling like a racing car and starts feeling more like a thicket of uprooted trees hitting a bridge in a flash-flood, you don't need more of the same thinking that got to that condition.

You need a transformative change.

Transformative changes are either painful (people get fired and their successors get to implement the Brave New World) or they are an epiphany (the guy in a tight-fitting costume has arrived and swept away the logjam with a single glance of his X-ray vision).

Desktop virtualisation helps those IT professionals looking at complex and long-standing deployments to make platform change into a longer-term, softer-impact process.

This white paper:

Describes the architecture that underpins desktop and application virtualisation

Lifts the lid on the terminology to help with design, sizing, selection and implementation

Provides a view of, and links to details on, the Microsoft Desktop Virtualisation portfolio

Illustrates using these products through a case study from an early adopter

Outlines some custom and practice guidelines for Windows 7 guests

Dips a toe in the much larger topic of Virtual Machine Management

Explains what's free and what's paid for

Presents a sample checklist for a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) project that IT professionals can use as a starting point