Instructor: Virtualization is everywhere
in our enterprise networks.
And what began with virtualized servers
has now moved into the desktops
with virtual desktop infrastructure or VDI.
These systems can host desktop operating systems
within a virtualized environment
that's going to be hosted
by a centralized server or server farm.
This is a virtualization implementation
that separates the personal computing environment
from a user's physical computer.
The end user is then able to access
the virtual desktop from a thin client
or through a web browser.
And then they can interact
with that virtualized desktop
as if they were sitting right
in front of a standard desktop computer.
So for example, I have a Windows 10 machine
that I can access in the cloud
as part of a VDI network.
So if I want to use it, I launch a piece
of software on my Mac and it reaches out to the cloud
and I connect to that Windows 10 machine
and have access to all the resources I need
being run on that cloud.
Now, these VDI services have all
of the operating system,
the applications and everything else I need
to operate this Windows 10 machine.
Every time I try to run a command,
it processes it on that cloud server.
It doesn't process it on my local machine.
Instead, my local machine is just a dummy box
it's used to connect to it.
That's the idea of VDI.
This allows you to have it on a desktop,
a laptop, a phone, a tablet, anything.
It really doesn't matter
because the device is just there to connect
to the server and run that virtual image
which is just going to be doing all the processing
of the data for you on that remote server in the cloud.
And so, as I've been saying,
this server is now performing
all the application processing and the data storage.
This means you can use a Chromebook,
a MacBook, a Windows machine.
And again, it really doesn't matter
because, with VDI, we're really focused
on just connecting to the VDI environment,
but all the processing is being done
on the application and the server side for you
because of this, many enterprise networks
are going through an evolution
into VDI with a lot of companies
completely offloading their entire IT infrastructure
by using third party services that use VDI.
It's really tempting for a CIO to do this
because now they don't have to run
the operating systems anymore.
They don't have to worry about patching them
because the third party provider
can do all of it for 'em.
That's one of the huge benefits of VDI
and one of the main selling features.
But it isn't all good news.
One of the bad things about VDI
is that users have very limited
local processing ability.
So if the server is down or the network goes down
or the connectivity is down,
your users can't do any work.
So if there's an outage on that server,
everybody is down.
Whereas right now I'm sitting on my laptop
and if my internet connection goes out,
I could still do my work.
But in VDI, I couldn't do that
because if my network connection goes down,
I can't reach the server.
And so I would be out of luck.
So these are some of the things
you have to think about as considerations
when you talk about moving
to a VDI-based virtualization solution.
Now there are currently three models
for implementing virtual desktop infrastructures
within our network.
The first is a centralized model.
And this hosts all the desktop instances
on a single server or server farm.
The second is a hosted model.
In this model, the desktops are instead maintained
by a service provider and provided
to the end user as a service.
We call this DAAS or desktop as a service.
Services like Amazon Workspaces,
VMware Horizon Air, and Citrix Xen desktop
are just a few of the most popular
providers of this service.
The third model is a remote virtual desktop model,
which involves copying the desktop image
to a local machine prior to being used by an end user.
This model eliminates the need
for constant network connections
and has much less requirements
for bandwidth than the other two models.