Virtual Desktops

A quick update on the Virtual Desktop session, which was presented by Pete Downing of Citrix. The solution is fairly similar to the VDI (Remote SDS) solution that is under development internally, with a couple of noteable exceptions.

The Citrix solution (demonstrated on top of Windows Sever 2008 running Hyper-V) uses a very shiny looking web interface for the end user, and the network transport between the client and the virtual machine is ICA rather than the RDP protocol that most other solutions use. Citrix claim a 15x performance improvement over RDP (maybe it should have read 1.5x) but given our experience with Remote SDS on RDP at Doane, where performance is not comparable to the existing Citrix terminal server solution (ICA transport again), maybe we should be looking at this solution more carefully.

Other nice parts of the solution include the automatic virtual machine provisioning which includes some scripting for personalisation, but until we can get to a stateless PC image I think we'll continue to struggle with deployment. At least it's given me something to think about!