Virtual Desktop Comfort Factor || !

Following the virtualisation news feed as I have been over the last month, I notice that VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution with its Virtual Desktop Manager 2 is fresh to the scene this week. Connecting users’ virtual desktops to the data centre to give IT admin staff extra control tends to produce a ‘comfort factor’ at both ends (sometimes, but please keep reading down) - and is often widely argued to make good sense from a security, upgrades and overall management and business continuity point of view.

The trend seems to be (and for sure, the salesmen out there will tell you) that the newest bunch of virtual desktop control environments will provide the kinds of controls previously only available for mission-critical server applications. Yes, they’ll tell you that costs will be controlled better than ever – but we expected that. What’s hopefully more interesting is that administrators can now manage thousands of desktops at once and reduce the time it takes to provision a new desktop from hours to minutes.

Just one comment from me:

IT admin staff tend to love this stuff. We know that.

General non-techie users think that this kind of technology is just great and they feel looked after and secure.

Developers, code-junkies and those with their fingers in the pie (so to speak) tend to hate all forms of virtual desktop management. They don’t want intrusion. The developer tends to know what they are doing and don’t always want systems administrators having this kind of access.

So how does VMware and other virtualisation gurus out there sell these products at ground level? Or doesn’t it matter as they CIO buys it in and they don’t have a choice?