New Virtualization Offerings: Niche or Not?

In the past year we’ve seen an influx of new product offerings from Citrix, VMWare, Microsoft, and other smaller vendors. We’ve also seen the “Cloud” take off. Many people say these new technologies are simply hype, or are useful in only a handful of environments. I think they’re wrong about both ideas.

New technologies such as the Client Hypervisor, the cloud, and even VDI are all wonderful new things; begging to be taken advantage of. Things change so fast that we can’t think in the same way too long, we have to have malleable minds. Don’t think about where you would utilize a client hypervisor in your current environment – you’ve already, most likely, perfected it without this new technology. You have to think about how you can make your current environment better with this new tool. You have to re-evaluate every decision you’ve made concerning your current environment.

In order to make imaging our PCs more efficient, we are replacing all of our PCs every 3 years in order to make sure they are not only up to date hardware-wise, but so that they are all the same and share drivers.

This scenario is more than likely all too familiar to many of you. With the client hypervisor, this can change, perhaps for the better.

We can increase our hardware lifecycle by using Citrix Provisioning Server to stream virtual disks to the PCs. With a client hypervisor, we dont have to have a standard model PC, we can replace computers as necessary and at a pace that is more cost efficient.

Both of these scenarios work. Which one do you prefer?