The growing maturity of virtual desktop technologies and customer interest in Windows 7 has VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) vendors expecting big adoption numbers in 2010.
But while most CIOs are at least thinking about desktop virtualisation, this year's projects may be limited to pilots and small deployments because of up-front costs and technology challenges that hamper user experience.
An recent survey of more than 800 businesses worldwide shows that 31 percent of respondents plan to implement VDI this year, more than double the previous year.
A related technology, application virtualisation, is also on the upswing with 37 percent of respondents planning implementations, an increase from 15 percent the previous year.
Some early adopters say they have saved money by prolonging the life of PCs or using less expensive thin clients, and that hosting desktop images in the datacenter improves manageability and makes it easier to restore an employee's desktop in case of device failure.
But moving desktop images and applications from the user's hands to the datacenter requires a major shift in both IT infrastructure and mindset.
But with many businesses planning to upgrade to Windows 7, IT departments are taking a closer look at virtual desktop models.
Windows 7 and the impending EOL for XP is refocusing IT departments to think long and hard about how they want to manage and deploy a major upgrade to the desktop estate, and this is where VDI is looking promising.
There are numerous models for enterprises to consider within the desktop virtualisation realm. There's presentation virtualisation, which executes applications on a server and remotely presents the application interface to a user's endpoint device.
Other forms of desktop virtualisation include blade PCs and client-hosted virtual desktops. A blade PC runs in the datacenter and can be accessed remotely by client devices, but each blade PC can only serve one user at a time. Client-hosted virtualisation, on the other hand, puts the desktop hypervisor on the desktop machine itself, requiring a more robust client device but also providing better options for offline access. .
VMware recently upgraded its ThinApp application virtualisation software to improve migration of applications from older versions of Windows to Windows 7. Microsoft, meanwhile, has lowered the price of licensing the Windows operating system in virtual desktop deployments, and announced new bundles with Citrix designed to lure customers away from VMware.
Specifically, Microsoft and Citrix are offering a year's worth of free desktop virtualisation for as many as 500 users for companies that switch from VMware View to Citrix's XenDesktop VDI and Microsoft VDI.
Lets face it get VDI wrong and everybody knows about it, get server virtualisation wrong and you can contain that easier.