Choosing the Right Desktop Virtualization Technology
Earlier in this chapter I talked about how VDI was pushed by some vendors and is the
“in thing” right now, but often using session-based desktops is a better solution. How
do you decide where to use each type of technology? There is no right answer, and
every environment is different. In this section, I share my insights about where VDI
and session virtualization work best, but there are always different opinions. In
reality, most companies I work with have a mix of session virtualization and VDI. The
key is no matter what approach, or combination of approaches, is used, the same user
state, data, and application virtualization can be used for all of them, and the physical
desktops in the organization give the user a consistent experience across every device
they will ever use—physical, session, or virtual.
I’ll quickly recap the key difference between session virtualization and VDI. Figure
11.19 shows session virtualization on the left and VDI on the right. With session
virtualization, each user connects to their own session on a shared server operating
system such as Windows Server 2016. With VDI, each user connects to their own
desktop operating system, such as Windows 10 running inside a virtual machine
running on a machine virtualization platform such as Microsoft Hyper-V. As the figure
shows, to the end user it looks exactly the same.
Figure 11.19 Session-based virtualization and VDI high-level overview
To help you make the right decision, I will cover what is the same and then what is
different about using session virtualization and VDI. I explore both from the user’s
experience and from the infrastructure/management perspective. Both factors must
be evaluated to help guide organizations the right way.
What is the same is the desktop environment. With session virtualization, the user is
connecting to a server operating system; and with VDI, the user connects to a client
operating system. But under the covers, both the server and the client OS share a huge
amount of code, so the actual desktop experience will look and feel the same. The