Digital Transformation, a buzzword in Enterprise IT which associates itself with transforming the way people interact with technology. All the data, be it structured or unstructured, has to be processed, stored, acknowledged and utilized to make advances in technology and change the world for the better.
When we comprehend the cultural manifestation of Digital Transformation, we find that employee experience is very much inherent to this process. Strategically, an Enterprise cannot be driven into the cycle of Digital Transformation, without transforming the employee experience.
How the people that are associated with the enterprise, interact with their work is an IT due diligence.
Enabling people to work from anywhere, anytime, with any device should be on the top priority list of the companies.
End-User computing in terms of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Traditional way of Desktop Provisioning involves procurement of desktops to each user which generally includes providing users with physical devices, installing OS and Applications, creating user profiles, pushing Applications to individual users and if anything goes wrong, rolling back.
After the successful provisioning and procurement of Desktops and Applications, the workload is offloaded to the system administrators who have to deal with the lifecycle management of the PC’s.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
What VDI brings on the table is a much different and secure manner to procure desktops and applications to the users. First of all, it is a virtual desktop and exists in your Data-center, hence making it very secure. What you see on the screen is just a rendered image of what exists in your Data-center.
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a desktop virtualization technology wherein a desktop operating system, typically Microsoft Windows, runs and is managed in a data center. The virtual desktop image is delivered over a network to an endpoint device, which allows the user to interact with the operating system and its applications as if they were running locally. The endpoint may be a traditional PC, thin client device or a mobile device.
The desktops can be either persistent or non-persistent depending on the business use-case.
Persistent VDI
With persistent VDI, the user receives a permanently reserved VDI resource at each logon, so each user's virtual desktop can have personal settings such as stored passwords, shortcuts and screensavers. End users can also save files to the desktop.
Persistent desktops have the following benefits:
- Customization. Because an image is allocated to each separate desktop, with persistent VDI end users can customize their virtual desktop.
- Usability. Most end users expect to be able to save personalized data, shortcuts and files. This is especially important for knowledge workers because they must frequently work with saved files. Persistent VDI offers a level of familiarity that non-persistent VDI does not.
- Simple desktop management. IT admins manage persistent desktops in the same way as physical desktops. Therefore, IT admins don't need to re-engineer desktops when they transition to a VDI model.
However, persistent VDI also comes with drawbacks:
- Challenging image management. The 1:1 ratio of persistent desktops means that there are a lot of individual images and profiles for IT to manage, which can become unwieldy.
- Higher storage requirements. Persistent VDI requires more storage than
non-persistent VDI, which can increase the overall costs.
Non-persistent VDI
Non-persistent VDI spins up a fresh VDI image upon each login. It offers a variety of benefits, including:
- Easy management. IT has a minimal number of master images to maintain and secure, which is much simpler than managing a complete virtual desktop for each user.
- Less storage. With non-persistent VDI, the OS is separate from the user data, which reduces storage costs.
The most commonly cited drawback for non-persistent VDI is limited personalization and flexibility.
For non-persistent VDI, the user profile, applications and other setting can be appended by creating a mechanism of profile redirection.
Various technologies are in place which enable this mechanism to redirect the user profiles and setting on launching a VDI, so that the user gets a personalized and customized desktop or application.
Microsoft FsLogix, VMware DEM, Citrix WEM are various profile management technologies widely adopted by Enterprise customers.
