The VDI Success Triangle: Management, Personalization, Storage

Today we were having a discussion with a customer about virtual desktops and what defines success in a VDI implementation. It came down to this: basically a complete VDI solution must allow for simple and scalable management of the environment, personalization of the desktops deployed, and minimal use of storage to keep the cost low enough to be palatable.

At this point my brain flashed to that old adage about “Speed, Quality, or Price, pick two”. The idea is that in any project or product implementation, these are your tradeoffs.

Sure you can have a high quality product to market really fast, but it will cost you. Or you can create a product really fast for very little money, but you wouldn’t want to use it to fly airplanes. You get the point…

And instantly I realized that we have the same type of triangle today with VDI, except it’s “Management, Personalization, or Storage, pick two”.

Much like the original product triangle, VDI today suffers from the “pick two” issue. If you want significant storage savings to bring cost down, you will most likely lose persistent personalization of the virtual machines. If you want customization and personalization of every desktop, you lose some of that nirvana of “single image management” or maybe the storage efficiencies. If you have to have a small storage footprint and it has to be easy to manage, then persistent personalization that “sticks” through upgrades and changes to the centralized images is often lost.

When I look at the VDI landscape and talk to customers attempting to realize the promise of VDI, I continually hear about them having to change their design to trade off one of the sides of the VDI Triangle.

At Unidesk we have figured out a way to provide all three sides of the VDI Triangle. Our solution allows for management of the OS and applications in a very simple fashion, persistent personalization of the virtual machines to give every user a unique VM desktop, while still providing the storage savings that are only possible today with thin provisioned or “linked clone” technology.

So does VDI success depend on the triangle I describe? Is it a triangle or am I completely off base and it is really a pentagon or octagon? Would love to hear your thoughts/experience along these lines.

-Ron Oglesby
Unidesk Chief Solution Architect