After catastrophic earthquakes in Christchurch toppled its New Zealand law office, Duncan Cotterill implemented desktop virtualization to provide stronger disaster resilience, according to the law firm’s CIO at the time.
Natural disasters, bring-your-own (BYO) computing and the overall familiarity that many organisations now have with virtualization has generated a groundswell of activity, with CIOs seeing desktop virtualization as a means to reassert their authority over the end-points in their business.
The popularity of consumer devices combined with the launch of four learning hubs has caused the University of Sydney to deploy desktop virtualization software across its campuses.
If two technology trends were ever made for each other, at least in vendor marketing materials and generically simple diagrams of IT infrastructure, they are the consumerisation of IT and desktop virtualisation.
NSW electricity grid operator, TransGrid, will move as many as 500 of its desktop PCs to virtualised thin clients in an effort to reduce costs and extend the hardware refresh cycle to seven years.
While some Australian hospitals have embraced tablet PCs, one major health services provider is holding off deployment until improvements are made in the form factor.
It's been said that Oracle is now the industry's most powerful open source vendor, but don't tell that to Red Hat executives, who say Oracle doesn't even qualify as an open source company.
Dell CEO Michael Dell contends that mobile devices will never kill the PC. Instead, he envisions a future where users own an increasing number and variety of devices, each capable of looking like the other via desktop virtualisation, served by virtual networks and the cloud.
Stressing desktop virtualization as a cost-saver for smaller enterprises, Kaviza is partnering with Citrix to boost Kaviza's VDI-in-a-box (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) technology.
Open source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to include support for desktop virtualization, the company announced Monday.
Leading virtualization software vendors Citrix Systems and VMware are both running behind in plans to ship so-called bare-metal hypervisors for desktop PCs.
Ulteo is poised to offer commercial support for its free virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software, which the open-source startup says will cost companies a fraction of established offerings from Citrix Systems, Microsoft and VMware, while offering, in some cases, more choice in platforms.
Choosing just enough virtual machines, but not too many, for a given server has always been a challenge. Running a set of virtual servers and the applications that they support on one physical server running just one operating system seems easy enough - at first.
A third of enterprises are looking to move to desktop virtualisation according to research from desktop services specialist Centrix. More than three-quarters of the respondents said that cost reduction was the prime driver for the move to the technology.
Open source virtualization hypervisor VirtualBox has reached version 3.1, which adds the ability to migrate a live virtual machine session between physical hosts.