Wednesday, 23 January 2008

Microsoft moves into desktop virtualisation (possibly)

very interesting post on desktop virtualisation on techworld - basically microsoft is partnering with citrix to redeploy what's fundamentally thin clientstyle computing as we know and love from the nineties.

In essence a lot of the compute is moved back onto servers and there's some tweaks this time to improve graphics performance.

Interestingly it's not a softgrid type environment where all the clients host a minimal operating system and execution engine and run virtual machines - the vmware style of solution.

This latter model means that execution happens locally and you can maintain a relatively close coupling between the user and the processes being executed - and all you need is a cheap device on the desktop and a deployment mechanism.

VmWare are working on this. Microsoft have their virtual pc and softgrid, not to mention sms, so why the return to thin client?

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