Desktop Virtualization & Management Overview

 

Microsoft Desktop Virtualization & Management solutions give your employees the flexibility to work everywhere on a range of devices – while simplifying compliance and management through a centralized and unified infrastructure.

 

Microsoft delivers a broad range of desktop virtualization offerings to address your unique business and IT challenges, spanning operating system, application and user-state virtualization. Microsoft Desktop Virtualization delivers the essential capabilities with the platform that you already own. When you combine this with the integrated management capabilities we provide, you can leverage your existing infrastructure not only today, but into the future.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is an alternative desktop delivery model that allows you to access desktops running in the datacenter. Hyper-V virtual machines run in the datacenter and provides a rich user experience, delivered to any device through a secure and high-fidelity protocol. The Microsoft VDI Suites allow you to manage your physical and virtual desktops from a single console, while providing great flexibility for deploying server-hosted desktops and applications.

 

Session Virtualization: Remote Desktop Services delivers session-based desktops or applications and is suitable for low complexity or task worker scenarios. It allows for high user density with a limited degree of personalization or isolation.  Microsoft VDI Premium Suite allows you to deploy both session and VDI-based solutions using the same common infrastructure, which delivers synergies and cost savings.

Microsoft Application Virtualization:  In a physical environment, every application depends on its OS for a range of services, including memory allocation, device drivers, and much more. Incompatibilities between an application and its operating system can be addressed by either server virtualization or presentation virtualization; but for incompatibilities between two applications installed on the same instance of an OS, you need application virtualization.  Application Virtualization allows you to isolate a specific application from the OS and other applications, eliminates conflicts between applications, and removes the need to install applications on PCs.

 

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization:  Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) removes the barriers to Windows upgrades by resolving application incompatibility with Windows Vista or Windows 7. MED-V delivers applications in a virtual PC that runs a previous version of the operating system (for example: Windows XP). It does so in a way that is completely seamless and transparent to you. Applications appear and operate as if they were installed on the desktop, allowing you to even pin them to the task bar. For IT administrators, MED-V helps deploy, provision, control, and support the virtual environments.

 

User State Virtualization isolates user data and settings from PCs and enables IT to store them centrally in the datacenter while also making them accessible on any PC by using Roaming User Profiles, Folder Redirection, and Offline Files.

 

 

Microsoft System Center 2012 helps extend management to your virtual desktops, providing your business with a "single pane of glass" for managing both your physical and virtual infrastructures. System Center 2012 meets a broad range of business needs, including:

 

Virtual desktop and application management. System Center 2012 Configuration Manager provides asset, application, usage, and desired configuration management for personal physical and virtual desktops.

 

End-to-end management of VDI infrastructure. System Center 2012 monitors state, health, and performance to ensure uptime and reduce overall cost of management.

 

Management of third-party VDI. For organizations with Citrix VDI solutions, System Center 2012 manages virtual machines and server utilization across the datacenter and provides enhanced management for VDI scenarios, allowing performance and resource based allocation of virtual machines.

 

Compliance insight. System Center 2012 and the IT GRC Process Management Pack use information collected from Configuration Manager and Active Directory to provide unified reporting and visibility of compliance in VDI environments.

 

Automated workflow. System Center 2012 also provides an automation platform for orchestrating and integrating IT tools, which can be used in many capacities for virtual desktop environments, including creating workflows for virtual application provisioning.