SYNOPSIS

Thanks to the rising importance of business mobility, the BYOD trend, and improvements in the underlying technology, the rate of adoption of desktop virtualization is faster today than ever before. Virtual desktop infrastructure (inclusive of both desktop and application virtualization) is becoming foundational to end user computing strategy. And increasingly, that foundation is being built on a more agile, intelligent, high-performance infrastructure—known as the software-defined data center (SDDC).

CHAPTER PREVIEWS

Article 1: Why Infrastructure Matters in Desktop and Application Virtualization

Desktop and application workloads shouldn’t be relegated to an infrastructure island. Although these workloads require special infrastructure design compared with traditional server workloads, that doesn’t mean that dedicated server and storage hardware is required, especially for organizations looking to leverage a cloud-like model for their architecture with greater service elasticity and economics. VDI workloads need the attributes of the SDDC as much as, or more than, any other workload in the data center. After all, when you think of desktop virtualization, you think of efficiency, agility, security, and cloud infrastructure—all of which are tenets of the SDDC. Bottom line, when deploying desktop and application virtualization, ensure that you leverage an architecture that’s built on the SDDC.

Article 2: Building the Future of the Desktop on the Software-Defined Data Center

It’s said that, in traditional IT departments, 80% of the budget is spent “just keeping the infrastructure running” and 20% (sometimes less) is spent on innovation. The SDDC vision gets more and more innovative every day, but today’s incarnation is mature, being used by many companies already, and is where smart companies should be investing time and energy so that they can soon move to the SDDC and reverse the traditional budget paradigm. Doing so will allow them to allocate 80% of the budget to innovation and 20% to data center maintenance. The next article will explore three focal points of SDDC investment that can improve any desktop virtualization deployment.

Article 3: SDDC – Powered Virtual Desktops and Applications

Companies of all sizes are implementing desktop and application virtualization. However, for VDI projects to be successful, companies must look at what the SDDC has to offer, including new and innovative features such as SDS, SDN, and HCI. Greater efficiency, flexibility, agility, cloud-like elasticity, and cost savings are all gained with a software-defined approach. It is imperative that you consider the SDDC before you implement desktop or application virtualization!