VDI Virtual Reality: Three Interesting Deployments

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks of announcements of new VDI deployments across the industry. We’ll start with perhaps the largest one, announced on Monday by Microsoft at its annual Tech-Ed North America 2011 conference. As part of the keynote, Microsoft Senior Vice Presidents Robert Wahbe and Jason Zander announced that the financial services giant HSBC is in the process of rolling out 100,000 VDI desktops across its enterprise. This was part of an overall presentation that touted Microsoft’s cloud and development platforms and it was further touted that this is one of the largest VDI deployments in the world, which sounds pretty accurate to us here at VDI Trender.

As part of the announcement of the HSBC deployment, Microsoft promoted the features of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, it’s management platform for virtualization, and also announced that NetApp and Cisco had joined the Microsoft Hyper-V Fast Track Program. NetApp has teamed with Cisco to develop a private cloud solution, the NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track and Cisco datacenter architecture. The push to private cloud is an interesting one for Microsoft, and the fact that the huge HSBC deployment would get center-stage attention at the Tech-Ed conference is an indication of Microsoft’s seriousness about VDI.

In other VDI Deployment news, Korea IT News reported that the system builder for Hyundai Motor Company’s VDI deployment will be decided later this month. What’s important is that this is the largest VDI undertaking in Korea and, as the article notes, the cloud computing industry in the country is paying close attention. The automotive group is about to finish a proof of concept, which is to apply the integrated solution of V-Block of the VMware, EMC and Cisco alliance. Once the test is done, the group determines whether to adopt it or not. Through the project, Hyundai is planning to enhance the security for its CAD data for car design. If that is the case, approximately 5,000 of its employees will use the system.

Another interesting announcement came from Menlo College, which is rolling out a VDI initiative using technology from VMware and Unidesk. The project involves creating virtual desktops with only local storage to bring the annual cost per desktop under $300. In making the announcement the college note that from a pure hardware and software standpoint the costs were about the same compared to physical PCS, but the college is already seeing the amount of staff time and effort to manage the VDI environment is much lower. The management software from Unidesk enables users to create a persistent desktop that keeps all user customizations, including user-installed applications, with all of the storage efficiencies and single-image management benefits of non-persistent, stateless desktops.

So there you have it. Three new and interesting VDI deployments to watch and monitor. If you know of any other interesting deployments feel free to share them here.