How often do people in Finance swear at their PCs? And with good reason. PCs are precariously tuned beasts; the slightest thing or seemingly nothing at all can cause them to crash, which leads to considerable cursing.

The cost of supporting desktops across the organization can also lead to swearing. PCs may be cheap to acquire but maintaining them over their working life is costly. That’s why organizations are starting to consider desktop virtualization, referred to as desktop virtual infrastructure (VDI).

VDI is only slowly catching on. Partner’s North Shore Medical Center tried VDI and was pleased with the results, but its VDI success hasn’t quite led to a groundswell. VMware, the leading virtualization vendor, teamed with IDC, a top IT industry researcher, to introduce virtual client computing (VCC), essentially VDI in a somewhat different form.

VDI eliminates the need to maintain a fully configured PC on each desktop. Instead, users have what may seem like a PC, with the desktop configured exactly as they like, but the applications and the data are delivered centrally through a well-managed server. The device might look and act like a PC, but it doesn’t have to be.

Some savings come from getting away with less costly desktop devices. The biggest savings, however, come from the reduction in the support burden. VDI puts an end to viruses, crashes, and illicit software. Instead of a dispersed support team trying to configure, update, and patch dozens, hundreds, even thousands of desktop computers scattered around the enterprise, a small support team in a central network operations center can handle it all remotely — tech support, help desk, you name it.

The ROI for VDI varies, according to Michael Rose, IDC’s lead VDI analyst. Organizations that routinely lock down their desktops experience lower support costs anyway, making the payback from VDI less. Where workers have great flexibility in their desktops, support costs run much higher and the VDI payback is correspondingly greater. Here is a podcast of Rose discussing VDI.

In all cases, VDI promises reduced desktop total cost of ownership, improved manageability, and enhanced security. At this early stage, the first adopters come to VDI mainly for the security and compliance advantages resulting from locked down desktop systems that are managed through a secure central data center.

A slew of vendors are rushing into VDI. VMware and Microsoft, of course, are there, but new players keep popping up. Pano Logic offers a sleek desktop cube as a virtual desktop. MokaFive promises to deliver a user’s virtual desktop anywhere on any device. Desktone offers VDI as an outsourced service like SaaS.

VDI is not yet as straightforward as it should be. It remains a challenge to assemble and support the various technologies required for VDI, and there are questions about scalability. But when VDI finally becomes mainstream, people might actually stop cursing their PCs. ###