Spring is fully upon us and the summer heat is looming in the not too distant future. Many of us are planning out our summer vacations to beat the heat and spend time with our friends and families. While our minds are probably already off to some beachside locale, there is still a bit of time before we’ll be flying there ourselves. In the meantime, perhaps now is as good a time as any to look into moving your business over to an older and simpler way of computing. Session based technology has been around for many years and at one point in the late 90’s/early 2000’s it was a very popular desktop architecture. For a variety of reasons it became less popular primarily due to the desktop hardware cost decreasing significantly. Session Based computing is where you take all the data and processing activity off the local desktop and have it take place on a robust server. By doing this you can have multiply desktop sessions running on a single server if you were so inclined. For best practice methodology, bva recommends putting all sessions spread over two (2) servers to ensure up-time and load balancing for the user community. The great advantages of Session Based Computing are the following:
- Smaller Footprint
- Eco-Friendly and More Green
- All Data on Servers, No Loss of Data
- Seamless and Consistent Interface over Different PC’s
- Ability to Leverage Older PC Hardware for Production
- Ability to Leverage Newer Operating Systems Virtually Without Conflict
- Application Virtualization Ensures Seamless User Experience
The most popular products leveraged today for this type of architecture are as followed:
- Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Server)
- Citrix Systems
- Vmware View
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is another name for Session Based Technology. VDI is an emerging architectural model where a Windows client operating system runs in server-based virtual machines (VMs) in the data center and interacts with the user’s client device such as a PC or a thin client. Similar to session virtualization (formerly known as Terminal Services), VDI provides IT with the ability to centralize a user’s desktop; instead of a server session, however, a full client environment is virtualized within a server-based hypervisor. With VDI, the user can get a rich and individualized desktop experience with full administrative control over desktop and applications. However, this architecture, while flexible, requires significantly more server hardware resources than the traditional session virtualization approach.
Key benefits of VDI are:
- Better enablement of flexible work scenarios, such as work from home and hot-desking
- Increased data security and compliance
- Easy and efficient management of the desktop OS and applications
