Michael Rose, Research Analyst at IDC, discusses the rise of best practices for virtual desktop infrastructures in this executive interview sponsored by Citrix Systems.

Many companies are now talking about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as a way of delivering desktops virtually to end-users. Is this becoming a viable technology for mainstream enterprise customers?

Large strides are being made in the technology behind VDI, and it is increasingly becoming viable for nonmobile users in a specific, though growing, set of use cases. However, there are still limitations associated with the technology in terms of operating system licensing, storage and performance. Microsoft licensing terms are very restrictive in terms of running windows client operating systems in a virtualized environment, and the cost of moving from distributed local device storage to network-based storage can be significant. Also, there are performance limitations associated with server-based computing solutions in general; and though there have been significant strides made in that area, the model will need to offer an equivalent level of performance with the technology it is replacing before we can expect wide-scale adoption. Overall, IDC is bullish in terms of its expectation for VDI becoming viable for a broadening set of users.

Read the entire article at its source here