Desktop virtualization is still uncharted territory for many organizations and CIOs, such as Maytee Aspuro, CIO at the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. That’s why she and Fennell both had backup plans in case their application and desktop virtualization projects blew up in their cutting-edge faces.

Aspuro and her team are virtualizing 1,200 desktops using VMware desktop virtualization and Unidesk virtual desktop management technologies. The pilot phase in 2010 called for hiring a new staff that could virtualize 350 desktops within eight months. The time frame unnerved her because she had walked into a freshly minted organization: The department was new, created by the merger of three government agencies, and it had 30 vacant IT staff positions.

So, while Aspuro’s team began building a platform for a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), she bought Lenovo laptops fully loaded with applications for employees in the field. Fortunately for her, the pilot phase went well, and the remaining 850 devices, old and new, will be repurposed as virtual desktops, including the Lenovo laptops.

“With such a tight timeline, and because we hadn’t done VDI before, we needed a fallback plan that we could put in place in only a few weeks,” Aspuro said.

Fennell calls his contingency plan a hybrid mode in which users could access their data and applications on his college’s Web portal, using VDI, application virtualization and provisioning technologies by Citrix Systems. The applications also were installed locally on college-owned devices so users could use the Web portal and compare it to their app performance on their college desktops.

This hybrid approach also “gave users a level of comfort that, if [the Web portal] crashed, they had their application locally installed as well,” Fennell said.

After a year, as students became comfortable with the Web portal’s performance, Fennell’s team began removing the locally installed applications, and all new apps became Web-portal-accessible only.

It wasn’t exactly a contingency plan, but more of a reassurance to users getting used to a new services delivery model. Still, phasing in desktop virtualization is highly recommended, whether it’s done to comfort end users or to make sure that the technology actually does what it’s supposed to do in a complex computing environment that has a lot of room for error.

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Yet the fate of virtual desktops seems less assured than the vendors would have it, given casual conversations I had with attendees at VMworld a few weeks ago. Most of the people were there to learn, and wanted to be “more virtualized,” as if 100% virtualization was a laudatory goal. But what I took away from sessions and discussions was that businesses should start the VDI conversion slowly and thoughtfully, with non-mission-critical apps first. The oft-repeated disclaimer was that VDI may not work for every application. The downside is disconnection and latency, which renders employees less productive; and that costs a whole lot more than the VDI hardware.

Other reality checks are coming in. “If time is money, then, in my anecdotal view, this is a huge money hole,” writes a senior programmer analyst in response to my story last week on the ROI of VDI. “I do not have quantitative numbers to give you, but I would guess I am 100 times more productive on my old laptop than on the VDI environment. . . . I am excluding the number of times the VDI is down, or my session is unexpectedly terminated.” The performance is significantly slower, he adds. “Any action or movement by your mouse, or by entering in keystrokes, adds 5 seconds. . . . [A] problem that used to take 15 minutes to resolve will now take about an hour because I have to wait for the desktop to respond.”

While the virtualization industry works to improve such performance issues, significant growth in desktop virtualization has not been realized, according to IDC. “Vendors would need to continuously improve and simplify the [virtual desktop infrastructure] solution, and customers would need to understand client virtualization technologies and how to extract value from each component,” IDC concluded in a recent report predicting that client virtualization will begin to experience rapid adoption in the latter part of 2010 and in 2011.

Email me at lsmith@techtarget.com.

This year, anecdotally, VMware said at its partner show that the majority of its customers are evaluating, testing or rolling out its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product.

Last month, Citrix Systems said that 1,000 new customers bought its desktop virtualization technology in Q4 2009, with several customers buying more than 10,000 seats.

In addition, a very large food manufacturer plans to virtualize 10,000 desktops this year, according to a system integrator I spoke with who had interviewed a job applicant working on the project.

There aren’t many CIOs putting themselves out there as desktop virtualization pioneers on a large scale, however. There are risks involved, after all: The technology is not mature, the ROI is questionable, new strategies have to be developed to account for the capacity needs of a virtual infrastructure, and software companies are still trying to figure out how to support their applications in a virtual environment.

Yet companies are moving forward with desktop virtualization. Independent Bank Corp., out of Iona, Mich., for example, has 1,000 virtual desktops as part of its disaster recovery strategy.

Disaster recovery was not named as a top driver for desktop virtualization in an informal survey conducted by Forrester Research analyst Mark Bowker. What did top the list? Reduced capital expenses associated with traditional desktops, simplified application upgrades and deployments, and reduced operational expenses tied to supporting client devices.

Let us know what is moving desktop virtualization forward — or holding it back — at your company. Email ctorode@techtarget.com.