The Virtual Desktop

1084 Words3 Pages

The days of the old-fashioned computer dumb-terminals that connected to a mainframe computer which encompassed an entire room are long gone. Most college students weren’t even born yet at the height of the mainframe computer generation. Desktop virtualization is the latest and greatest emerging technology that calls for a reinvention, of sorts, of those dumb-terminals. Although no universal definition of what a virtual desktop is exists yet, the basic idea is that one server or a number of servers run the application software that the business user connects to. The physical desktop does not run the application itself as it resides on the server.

Windows and Linux are but two of the many companies that offer virtual desktop programs and applications. The applications run the gamut of user interfaces that range from state-of-the-art graphical interfaces that can be switched between multiple monitors to basic no-frills word processing functions. While the popularity of desktop virtualization has increased in recent years, there are advantages and disadvantages to a company moving forward with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Many IT professionals spend as much as 80 percent of their day moving from office to office maintaining the fat-client desktop. Although the fat-client will be around for the foreseeable future, IT shops gladly look forward to the day when the virtual desktop becomes a reality. In a medium to large organization, this could mean hundreds of man-hours per week in savings that could be better spent if virtual desktops were the norm. As virtual desktops move into the mainstream of an organization, management of application and desktop configuration will be moved to the controlled and...

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...o one knows for sure if the technology will catch on in mass, we can only imagine what is possible and see what the clouds have in store for us.

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