Honestly speaking, VDI solution could cost more compare to traditional desktop deployment. Cost saving will not be the selling point for this solution with business users, and IT team will not be the key decision maker to adopt on this. Similar to cloud computing, the target audiences are required to go beyond from IT group only. Business will be the 1 who pay the bill at the end of the day, and IT will be responsible to execute the solution for business enabler.

A VDI project will hardly catch interests or attentions from business users, but a desktop transformation will change the whole thing. I would rather not to talk about brand, hardware or etc while dealing with business users about VDI topics. They are more interesting to know how it could transform the current user experiences to the next level. If you are still thinking the VDI will only be accessing your desktop from pc, laptop or thin client, you are on the wrong path. A virtual desktop should always available & accessible anyway at anytime with Applications and Data.

Beside this, the next generation desktop management should come with uptime SLA and recovery SLA. This is not happening today in major enterprise environment.You will require to hands off your laptop for 4 hours to re-image if your operating system is corrupted. This will no longer happen with VDI in place. Desktop offline often cost business lost in every segment. Uptime SLA and resolution SLA is absolutely important in this case.

Data Security are always important to every organization. Information leaks could cost multi-million dollars lost to the business. This could be prevented by introducing the next generating desktop computing without sacrificing the performance require for the end point users.

To summarize this, a VDI not just to replace the desktop you have on the desk, but rather it will transform the ways we utilize and manage our desktops environment and applications availability.

That will be more opportunity for the next generation of student might be 70% study with computer base, I believe the relevant department should start to implement the VDI for some significant power saving and reduce the pollution generated by each of the desktop. Imagine for the school in Malaysia today, you will easily get 50 to 200 PC per school which provided by the education minister for student usage. Imagine the number of PC will generate the extra cost for manage and refresh, VDI will be something that will fit for long term solution. With VDI, we will able to fully utilize the hardware resource today as well as simplify managing the image require to be run for each virtual desktop. With economy crisis now , I believe cost cutting is not only happen on private sector, the goverment should practice the cost and effective way to provide world class knowledge and solution in term to grow the kids for the future too.

Obviously, I do not believe it will be easier to manage 200 physical desktop VS 200 VM in the same location. And of course, we will save the earth by minimize the usage of power as well as the carboon foot print. Imagine for the university, it may have more than 500 PC or servers easily to provide hosting services related to university acedemy related. Virtualization do help to improve efficiency as well as cost reduction from OPEX and CAPEX  perspective. I know that the famous local University in Malaysia had success roll out for VMWare Infrastructure 3. They should start look at VDI as the next.

If I do own a company by myself, I will for sure to have VDI for most of the staff that are not require laptop for travel or after hour working purpose. VDI is just easy and fast to be recovered. The cost to manage a VM VS Physical machine is always lower, and the performance for the VM is just more than enough.