With an extra-slender thin client and its vSpace software, NComputing has virtualized 2.5 million desktops.

Companies looking to move to desktop virtualisation should be wary of what approach to take.

By Lydia Leong

Hot on the heels of a day of rumors, VMware announced the acquisition of Zimbra, the open-source email platform vendor previously purchased (and up until now, still owned by) Yahoo!.

It's a small office/retail/branch scheme that we found worked simply and was difficult to load down with work in a multi-core desktop server box (we used a dual-core HP media server). The X550 is an old-school idea with a virtualization-controlled twist that may please some organization’s budget needs.

We found in testing that there's no magic formula for figuring out how many client sessions a specific server can support. The number of VDI instances that can be handled by a single server is a function of the server's memory, disk resources, the number of active cores.

Microsoft does not offer a specific, purpose-built VDI tool comparable to XenDesktop or VMware View, so we did not include Microsoft in our test. In fact, based on Microsoft's longstanding relationship with Citrix, Microsoft suggests using XenDesktop for VDI — especially for Windows 7 hosting.

VDI is a hot topic for a number of reasons. Companies familiar with server virtualization are looking to extend to the desktop. Microsoft is delivering client virtualization in Windows 7. And VDI offers a way to control desktop costs, improve security and deliver enterprise apps to phones and other mobile devices.

The Pano Manager and Cube require VMware, but is a decent investment atop this expensive platform. Its simplicity is bliss, and it doesn't require VMware's vCenter to do the majority of its work. A baseline VMware server platform should do the trick, and it can use the "free" VMware ESXi platform.

VMware Workstation 7 is still king for developers and techs, but innovative VirtualBox 3.1 and easy-to-use Parallels Desktop 4 gain ground

Microsoft is pushing desktop virtualization as a way of making Windows 7 play nicely with old applications, especially those written for Windows XP. So now that the technology has been "blessed" by Microsoft, can the industry brace for a desktop-virtualization boom? Probably not, most experts agree.