Virtualisation Products and Technologies

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is one of the many Optimised Desktop scenarios offered by Microsoft to help organisations optimise their IT infrastructure. It is a comprehensive set of Microsoft and partner technology, enabling centralisation of desktops, applications and data. This offering provides Enterprise IT with integrated management of physical, virtual and session based desktops, centralisation of user data, and improved application delivery. End users may benefit from a rich remote experience, highly secure and flexible access to their information and increased business continuity. VDI benefits non-mobile workers in enterprises that have sophisticated and mature IT departments. It is best suited for contract and offshore workers, users who need access to corporate desktops and applications, and for users that work from home occasionally and whose primary desktop is covered by a corporate license.

Key benefits of VDI include:

• Offers improved flexibility and desktop location independence, enhancing work scenarios such as work from home and hot-desking
• Facilitates improved business continuity through data centralisation
• Provides integrated management of physical, virtual and session-based desktops, including non-Microsoft infrastructure

Microsoft VDI combines leading-edge virtualisation technology with flexible, innovative licensing. Offering an excellent combination of performance and price, Microsoft VDI provides:

• A scalable, stable and high-performance hypervisor (Hyper-V Server or Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V ) that hosts virtual desktops
• An integrated management suite, Microsoft System Center, that allows IT to manage physical, virtual and session based desktops from a single console
• Application virtualisation technology that enables dynamic delivery of applications to a user’s virtual desktop rather than installing applications as part of the virtual desktop image
• A licensing option, Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop, to enable customers to license copies of Windows Vista running on servers

As a leading client-hosted desktop virtualisation technology, Microsoft Virtual PC has been in the market for over five years. Virtual PC lets you create separate virtual machines on your Windows desktop—each of which virtualises the hardware of a complete physical computer—and switch between them as easily as switching applications—with a mouse click.

• Runs operating systems such as MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2
• Supports multiple operating systems, whether for tech support, legacy application support, training, or consolidating physical computers

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation is an integral tool in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, a dynamic solution available to Software Assurance customers that helps reduce application deployment costs, enable delivery of applications as services, and better manage and control enterprise desktop environments.

Virtual PC and MED-V Together

Together, Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation (MED-V, formerly Kidaro) with Virtual PC offers an excellent client-hosted desktop virtualisation solution.

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation (MED-V) adds four additional components on top of Virtual PC to enable enterprise deployment of desktop virtualisation:

• Serves as a virtual image repository and delivery system for creating, testing, delivering, and updating virtual images
• Provides centralised management and monitoring for the complete management of the virtual machine life cycle by IT staff
• Enables usage policy and data transfer control through an endpoint agent that enforces usage policies for the virtual machine
• Offers a seamless end-user experience with application shortcuts published to the user's start menu

Terminal Services presentation virtualisation, which separates where an application or desktop is used from where it is run, enables organisations to consolidate applications and data in the data centre while providing broad access to local and remote users.

• Helps accelerates and extend the deployment of applications
• Helps keeps critical intellectual property highly secure by removing applications and data from the desktop
• Helps enable ordinary Windows desktop applications to run on a shared server machine, yet presents its user interface on a remote system