In various situations, it is sensible to consolidate desktops onto a virtual infrastructure, allowing users to connect to a pool of virtual machines running various OSes. Virtual hardware is often easier to manage than physical hardware, providing an easy way to deploy desktops using thin-clients such as Wyse terminals which connect to terminal servers.
Currently, thin-clients normally connect to Windows Terminal Servers or Citrix Metaframe which provide a shared pool of computing resources for parallel-running copies of applications. Sometimes applications don't behave well in this environment.
VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure provides an alternative, yet complimentary, approach to running virtual application environments. Instead of viewing an individual application's window, a user can now gain access to an entire Windows XP desktop running in a virtual machine.
The desktop can be dedicated to a specific user, allowing the user to connect to it at any time from any location without any limitations in software being installed or interference from other users. Performance guarantees can also be met. “Live” backups of the virtual machine are provided the same as our high-availability virtual machines.
Pools of pre-configured virtual machines are available with various OSes and OS versions, so cross-OS testing is easy.
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