Last week, UK's, "The Register" conducted a survey on VDI in which they found that although customer interst in VDI is high, customers see cost as the primary roadblock to adoption. This exactly matches our experience. We founded Kaviza to eliminate the cost and complexity of VDI. Here are some highlights from the survey resuts:

Server-based VDI was second only to Terminal Services (TS) as the most adopted form of desktop virtualization. Given how long TS has been around and how new VDI is this is quite remarkable and it validates the sort of interest that we are seeing among both customers and partners.


So if there is so much interest and understanding why aren't deployments going through the roof? What's holding VDI adoption back? Well, the latter questions of the survey bring that out well. It has to do with the costs.

Cost was picked by respondents as the major reason for not moving forward with VDI. Over 75% felt the upfront infrastructure and implementation costs of VDI was the biggest roadblock, followed closely by the high storage costs.

Of course, this is exactly why we founded Kaviza two years back. Having led VDI for large companies, we saw how expensive it is to implement traditional VDI. This is because traditional VDI is layered on top of a generic server virtualization platform and uses the same heavy infrastructure that was designed to virtualize a few mission critical applications (in the hundreds) as opposed to thousands of desktops. And therein lies the issue. Current VDI approaches require big-iron servers, shared storage like SANs, high-speed interconnects - all of which are expensive to acquire and deploy.

At Kaviza, we realized the only way to bring down the cost was to start from scratch. We set out to design a VDI architecture that could run on inexpensive commodity whiteboxes and scale horizontally like modern Web architectures (e.g. Google). No more high-speed interconnects and shared storage and servers with expensive FC HBA cards. Kaviza's VDI-in-a-box is a distributed next gen VDI solution that provides virtual desktops at sub-$500 prices (the pricepoint is the fully loaded cost of a virtual desktop, including Microsoft's VECD license and all the infrastructure). We recently launched a Beta, and the response has been overwhelming.

If you'd like to try it for yourself, check out our free trial. In and hour or two you should be up and running with a single server and many desktops. If you want HA, then email us to get the license that will allow you to tie many such boxes together without the need for shared storage, high-speed interconnects and all the other stuff needed for mission critical server virtualization. In case you want to read the articles: click here to participate in the survey, its still open. See the results here.



Kumar

Labels: Desktop Virtualization, poll, Register, VDI cost, VDI survey, virtualization