Now that we've covered what it is, how you install/configure it, and how it REALLY works ("caring" more about the assignment to the desktop than to the user), I'll explain why I think the technology is great, how it will help, but also why it's not the "end game" most of the end user computing world is looking for.

First, there are several reasons why I think this technology is a great step forward. It allows the virtual desktop to be much more "user-friendly" in that the user can customize it, install their own applications, and make it the way THEY want it-- versus being "constrained" by the way the IT department wants their desktop to be. This increases user buy-in and morale, and can help push a proof of concept over the last hurdle.

It minimizes the amount of management required for "dedicated" desktops, as you still have a single image to patch, install standard apps on to, etc. It's also a technology from a 3rd party that used to charge per user, but is now included at no additional cost into the XD offering.

It took almost no time at all to configure and set up, and has worked flawlessly since-- it doesn't require re-learning an entire solution. These are all great and important things.

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However, where I see this falling short today is that it requires a user-to-desktop assignment in a 1:1 manner, the same way dedicated desktops do. To recap quickly, what this means is when a user logs in for the first time, they are assigned a specific desktop (let's say XD15), and every time they log in moving forward, they will receive the SAME desktop (XD15).

So for every user you need a virtual desktop.

There are a few reasons for this, and they're all good reasons.

The PVD is "assigned" to a desktop for the user, and it stays put on that desktop. It HAS TO stay on that desktop because the "PVD layering" does not get loaded at login. It gets loaded at boot time to allow it to access drivers, system services, and low-system level components some applications require. If this "disk layering" was handled at login, you'd lose that.

It's also good to note that this is the same situation with Unidesk-- a technology very similar to the RingCube PVD technology.

You might be thinking "well that's not a big deal, I'll have a desktop for each user (which you may already be doing) and they'll be able to do everything they need. This still sounds great!", and I couldn't blame you for it. But this 1:1 mapping of user to desktop creates what's known as the "Concurrency problem".

Let's say you have a total of 1000 users that connect to your virtual desktop environment each day. They're broken out into separate shifts of 250 users each, so at any given time, 250 connections and virtual desktop are in use. You'd still need 1,000 desktops provisioned (1 for each user), even though 750 of them wouldn't be used at any given time in the day.

It's because of this that a lot of (specifically) VDI solutions combine different desktop pool types, with some as non-dedicated, and now likely some without the PVD feature. The PVD pools could be used for "power users" or executives, and the non-persistent "floating" desktops could be used for task workers. It adds a little bit of management overhead, but not much considering the power of the solution. And it's likely this is how things will remain for the near term-- it's an acceptable solution/design.

To me, and also to Gunnar (we had a good discussion around this a few times now), the ideal solution for Personal vDisk / Persistent Disk / Unidesk would be to have the PVD, whatever the name is, float with the user and require no desktop assignment. You could create a pool of only the # of desktops needed at any given time and regardless of which desktop the user was connected to, their PVD would "snap-in" and they'd have access to their data, profiles, and self-installed applications. That's the sweet spot.

Until then, keep the concurrency problem in mind when doing your designs, and be sure to give yourself plenty of disk space in your PVD-- you'll find yourself installing more apps than you originally planned for (I know I did).