Clients for Virtual Desktops

As some of you may know, I am in Cannes this week for the VMWorld Europe 2009 conference.
I was here last year and had a great time and learned a lot.
This year I am here thanks in part to Veeam who kindly sponsored my entrance fee. I will be blogging Veeam's range of Virtualisation products during the course of the week.
In the meantime I just wanted to clarify one of the things I am hoping to find out about this week and this is client software used to access Virtual Desktops.
Competition in the Virtualisation world has been hotting up over the past few years. VMware is the market leader with Microsoft and Citrix following closely behind. I have been working on virtual solutions for many years now and I have experience with all of these solutions but one area that both fascinates and irritates me is cross platform client software used to access these systems or at least the lack of it.
In the past it's been primarily servers that have been virtualised and that market is growing as more and more companies and enterprises adopt virtualisation solutions. Now the focus is turning towards virtualisation of the desktop computer. The advantages are clear: cost, control, security and management. There is no need for high powered, expensive desktop computers to be deployed or to create complicated installation builds for desktops which take a long time to deploy which has an overhead for support as well.
Now the desktop computer that the user has on their desk can be almost anything that can run the client software to access the virtual desktop.
But there's the rub, the client software for VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is PC only. So if you want to use other computers such as Apple Macs you can't.
Citrix on the other hand has had cross platform support for client computers for many years. You can even download a client that runs on a smart phone to access applications running on your virtual desktop.
Citrix's XenDesktop solution is the only virtual desktop solution that has Mac support.
I have customers that work with Apple Macs and use VMware Fusion or Parallels to run Windows so that they can access applications such as Microsoft Office and other line of business applications that only run in Windows. If I could provide them with a Virtual Desktop and the client software to access it, they would no longer need to run VMware Fusion giving back some precious processor capacity to devices such as the MacBook Air.
Even underpowered low storage devices such as Netbooks would thrive in this environment.
So I hope this week will see some changes in this area. There are rumours but we will see for sure over the next few days.
Stay tuned.

Comments

[Donna Jackson]

Great blog, ive been reading it to keep up to date with gadgets, knowing how you love iphone. vitual platforms have helped me to get around the silly vista issue.