{"id":24835,"date":"2022-08-18T08:06:27","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T12:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/?p=24835"},"modified":"2023-01-19T03:28:26","modified_gmt":"2023-01-19T08:28:26","slug":"best-virtual-desktop-infrastructure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/best-virtual-desktop-infrastructure\/","title":{"rendered":"Choosing the Best Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Technology for Your Enterprise"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/span>What is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)?<\/span><\/h2>\n

\"Best<\/a> Virtual desktop infrastructure<\/a> (VDI) is a technology that refers to the use of virtual machines to provide and manage virtual desktops. Users access virtual desktops from their laptops, desktops, thin clients, or mobile devices from anywhere. Virtual desktops are hosted in a data center, on servers, and all the necessary processing is done on the server that hosts the virtual desktops. Hence, VDI provides secure access to remote workers with confidential and proprietary data held securely in the data center. In this blog, we will explore the similarities and differences between the best VDI technologies of today – Citrix, VMware, Azure and AWS.<\/p>\n

eG Innovations has been providing end-to-end IT application and infrastructure monitoring<\/a> for over two decades (founded in 2001) to enterprises worldwide. One of our long-established core business areas has been the support of VDI and digital workspace technologies both on-premises and more recently within the cloud to offer remote desktops, apps, and services securely.<\/p>\n

With comprehensive support within eG Enterprise for all the major vendor stacks including Citrix<\/a>, Omnissa Horizon<\/a>, Microsoft RDS<\/a> and Azure Virtual Desktop<\/a>, Amazon WorkSpaces<\/a>, and AppStream 2.0, we have seen and experienced the rationale and factors that drive customers\u2019 choices in practice and indeed see many customers who have adopted multiple workspace technologies to gain the benefits where individual product stacks excel.<\/p>\n

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<\/span>Typical VDI Architecture<\/span><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s been over 15 years since VDI was first discussed as an alternative to server-based computing. There are several vendors of VDI technologies today \u2013 Citrix with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, VMware with Horizon, AWS with WorkSpaces and AppStream 2.0, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), and of course, Microsoft with Remote Desktop Services (RDS). A recent survey on digital workspaces<\/a> conducted by eG Innovations and XenAppBlog provides more insights into the adoption trends, challenges, and opportunities in leveraging these technologies.<\/p>\n

VDI deployments, irrespective of the vendor of choice have become very standardized. Users log in to a portal and once authenticated, they can access their virtual desktop from the browser itself, or through a separate client (e.g., Citrix Workspace App, Horizon client, etc.).<\/p>\n

VDI solutions have matured and technologies have evolved to eliminate and mitigate problems in earlier solutions \u2013 particularly those associated with poor user experience, slow logons, and application performance issues. Modern VDI solution stacks now routinely include advanced protocols, profile management technologies, and image optimizations.<\/p>\n

While the usage model for VDI is simple, there is a significant infrastructure required to support it. Figure 1 below shows a typical Omnissa Horizon-based VDI infrastructure. As you can see, several hardware and software components are required to support virtual desktops.<\/p>\n