Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler WIndows Server Hardware Recommendations

Because then you can maintain them all as one, among other advantages. Basically, you can link many desktop vms to a single master image. Need to do some system updates on all your virtual desktops? No problem! Just update your master image.

Another major advantage this provides is portability. You can connect to your desktop vm from anywhere.

This kind of solution really makes a lot of sense for many companies.

Well, we're not doing the first part. But the second is the important bit. Also, disaster recovery for the future--if you can migrate all of your desktop VMs to a remote site, bing, people can be up and running (at least on their desktops) almost immediately.

Connect with what and to do what? Are the VMs replacing desktops?

We're using VMware View. Around the office we have Wyse P20 thin clients. But there is also a client for Windows/Mac/Linux that allows anyone with a computer to connect to the View connection server and access the same computer that they see at their desk. They can even sit down at someone else's desk and still get the same computer they have at their own.

Fred, essentially yes. This only works in certain scenarios, because obviously you have to have SOMETHING to connect to the VM with. It works well for test/dev stuff, or for work from home type situations.

OK, that makes sense. I thought I was having flashbacks to dumb terminal days (or do they call them ultra-thin clients these days??).

Zero clients, if you believe that.

Everything old is new again.

For the record I liked serial terminals, and am all for keeping computing resources localized, and just having displays out on the desk.

Hmm, what does that make the user, a zero?

Its funny how things just keep cycling.

Doesn't running a whole whack of desktop VMs clog the network? We can't seem to keep things reasonable between here and our head office and we do not exactly have high bandwidth demands.

Not really. They use RDP or PCoIP, both of which are pretty lightweight protocols. I get decent performance at home going from my crappy 1.5mbit DSL connection across the country to HQ.