For the past five years there has been a huge amount of attention and debate around hypervisors’ in general. Originally Hypervisors were being leveraged for Server Hardware Consolidation, High Availability/Fail-Over and Disaster Recovery. The latest use case associated with hypervisors, both VMware and Citrix XenServer is VDI or Virtual Desktops as Citrix would prefer the solution to be called (after all VDI makes you think of VMware).

VMware’s ESX hypervisor is based on a proprietary version of Red Hat Linux; their ESXi is based on a proprietary version of BusyBox Linux. Citrix’s XenServer is based on XenSource, an ongoing Open Source Linux initiative around the kernel (or source code) which leads us to XenServer which Citrix acquired and added proprietary features to, but still allows for absorption of open source features, which are developed at no cost to Citrix, they can “theoretically” incorporate them into their XenServer Product just by going out to Xen’s repository @ http://xenbits.xensource.com – on a regular basis and checking if there are any utilities, tools or features that can enhance their XenServer product line, then assimilate them (like the Borg☺).

VDI or Virtual Desktops are essentially client operating systems, such as Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, certain versions of Linux such as Ubuntu and even Apple’s Mac OS (though this is still pretty raw and needs to get some bugs shaken out of it) in isolated environments that allow users to be able to work while not impacting other users if they encounter OS issues. It’s basically a 1 to 1 scenario, the same as an end user working on a local PC that crashed; it would only impact that individual. The basic difference is that the users Virtual Desktop(s) happen to be in a data-center sharing space and resources with any number of other individual users on a very powerful hardware and network platform, Clearly this improves performance significantly because all the actual transactions are processed on the Virtual Desktop (and associated Host Hardware) that live in the same Data Center as Storage and backend Database(s), If fiber is being used between the Virtual Desktop server(s) and storage servers performance just screams.

So that is a 10 thousand foot view of what VDI\Virtual Desktops are, now let’s talk use case and later we will examine the various protocols on the market and how they interact and enhance Virtual Desktop Solutions. VDI or Virtual Desktops are not as far along in real world usage as they should be or will be. I predict that will change somewhat once Client Hypervisors become more viable (not to mention accessible) and consumer market barriers can be overcome. That’s not to say Virtual Desktop’s will ever be the ONLY solution or even the BEST solution for most enterprise class environments (I am excluding any mention\reference to consumer market potential for Virtual Desktops starting now).

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To learn more, read the entire post, Research Note: Hypervisor Overview – VDI Virtual Desktops VMWare & Citrix- SiliconANGLE.com