Enterprises of all stripes have enthusiastically embraced the many flavors of virtualization over the past decade, consolidating server, storage and networking resources in a bid to lower costs and reduce complexity. When it comes to virtualizing the desktop, however, the reception has been rather cool, despite the fact that the technology offers many of the same benefits as its more popular cousins.

What is it about the desktop that makes it so resistant to change? Certainly the objections to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) are well known. It's slow compared to local resources. It's expensive to deploy. It taxes network and centralized server and storage resources. And it lacks the customization that many users take for granted.

And yet all of these objections are being either eliminated or greatly alleviated with new generations of VDI technology, which not only offer unique and customizable user environments, but maintain a significant cost advantage over tricked-out PCs on every desk.

But aside from a handful of showcase installations, few enterprises have seen fit to deploy VDI to any significant degree. Why?

That key question has been driving VDI development for several years now, particularly as rising energy costs and falling revenues have made enterprises more willing to try unconventional approaches to all manner of IT resources to lower both capital and operational expenses.

"The two things holding people back are cost and the quality of the user experience," says Chris Kawalek, product line manager for desktop virtualization marketing at Sun Microsystems. "Sun has been in the VDI market for 10 years now with the introduction of the SunRay client that ran on a centralized OS using a simple client device. As we make more improvements like better 3D graphics support, we're getting to the point where the VDI environment is pretty much the equivalent of the standard PC, although it will probably never match it completely."

Sun recently upgraded its platform with the Sun VDI Software 3 that offers things like a built-in hypervisor that breaks the dependence on VMware, plus an integrated Remote Display Protocol (RDP) that expands the number of available operating systems to include Windows, Vista and Ubuntu. The platform also incorporates the OpenStorage protocol, providing a wider variety of storage and SAN configurations and eliminating the need to maintain multiple desktop images for each user, freeing up significant chunks of centralized storage capacity.

Sadly, the system does not offer the ability to work offline, meaning that if the network goes down, so do all the clients.

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