This week I am attending BriForum. BriForum is a technical conference that draws attendees worldwide for a focus on application and desktop virtualization. This is eight time that this conference has taken place and is the brain child of blogger Brian Madden (www.brianmadden.com).
The day started early at 7am with breakfast and a high energy keynote by Brian himself. One of the key points that resonated with me in Brian’s keynote was that server virtualization has been very successful in penetrating into the datacenter, but desktop virtualization that has been promising similar cost and management saving has not been nearly as successful. The technical sessions started and ran until 5:30pm covered a wide range of topics to help fill in the gaps has why desktop virtualization (VDI) has been so slow in penetrating the market space.
The eye opening session which I plan on covering in more detail after the conference was one of the last ones on day one was given by Ron Oglesby is Chief Solution Architect at Unidesk, the virtual desktop management innovator. Ron pointed out first hand the challenges that face IT administrators that are looking to implement virtual desktops for end users. Many administrators, including myself (until this session) think that after successfully migrating or deploying a physical server environment to virtual environment, that a desktop migration uses that same requirements and architecture. After this session, a number of assumptions that are used in a server virtualization project do not translate directly to VDI. The biggest areas are networking, SLAs, and storage considers in the architecture.
I will give an update tomorrow and will try to address areas from Ron’s presentation. If you are attending BriForum stop by Xiotech at booth 407 and talk storage and storagement in virtual environments.
-Storagehacker