• Virtualisation & Consolidation
  • What is Virtualisation?
  • Server Consolidation
  • Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
  • Storage
  • Application Virtualisation

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

VDI is one of the industry hot topics and involves moving the desktop operating system inside the data centre hosted on virtual infrastructure, therefore providing users with access to their desktops in a centrally managed, secure and low TCO solution.

Virtual desktops are accessed via any unmanaged access device including PC’s, laptops and thin clients which may be located both inside and outside the corporate LAN/WAN. The technology is now quickly becoming a big area of focus for our customers looking to drive down the costs of managing and supporting desktop users across the whole organisation. Virtual Age has undertaken many European wide virtual desktop projects and is recognised as industry leaders.

At Virtual Age our vision of the corporate desktop is as follows:

• Completely virtualised desktop and applications
• Give users access to there own “personalised environment” using any manner of device both internal and external to the corporate network.
• The user experience must exceed or match whatever they are used to without impeding there ability to carry out their work
• Compliments or enhances any investment made in server based computing or Terminal Services
• Highly scalable and cost effective (provisioning, tracking and chargeback can be enhanced using our automation tools)
• Significantly reduce the management overheads and complexity of a traditional PC estate.
• Reduce the license and configuration overheads. Virtual desktop pools are increased and reduced automatically based on utilisation
• Separate the desktop from the underlying hardware convert into software and remove any hardware dependencies
• Improve control and security by centralising back into the data centre.
• Improve and enhance: remote and offshore workers and collaboration, work area recovery \business continuity and software development projects by enabling multiple virtual OS access and rapid provisioning and snapping of environments
• Improve application performance with the VM residing in the same DC (or even on the same host) as the application server or data.

Typically users don’t have visibility of IT projects and simply access their applications as a service, however everyone in a company from the CEO to the receptionist are touched by a VDI project and it is therefore the most user visible project IT can embark on and the associated risk must be planned and managed correctly which can only come from experience.

To view our own live production virtual desktop environment running both full VMware & Citrix suite of products please click here.