Over the next few posts, I will be explaining and demonstrating a product from Citrix. A term that has been a buzz word in the IT community is, BYOD (Bring Your Own Desktop). One problem that many small and medium sized businesses face are IT costs. One cost is associated with the physical desktops within their organization and another is the support of those physical machines. It takes money to buy new equipment and employ those that support that equipment. Keeping up with the demands of IT can increase costs exponentially for a small business owner. The progressive need to refresh equipment, and ensure that the support staff has the technical acumen to support the infrastructure, drives the role of the IT staff from developing new solutions to continually supporting and maintaining the infrastructure. This perpetual cycle has a damaging effect on the business.
One solution is to offer a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Virtualization occurs when virtual versions of computer resources are created on a Host. A thin layer of software called a Hypervisor is what makes this isolated communication possible between the Host and the VM. The virtual machine or VM, is a tightly isolated software container with an operating system and applications inside. Imagine a folder with files contained within it, completely portable. You can have virtualized operating systems, virtualized desktops, virtualized servers, virtualized storage, or virtualized network resources. More importantly, all of these virtualized resources can be used as effectively as physical resources to run business operations.
Citrix VDI-in-a-Box is an all-in-one VDI solution that delivers personalized virtual desktops securely to any device on any network. Available as a virtual appliance, VDI-in-a-Box runs on industry standard servers and eliminates the need for expensive data center infrastructure. I will continue to post step-by-step instructions on using VDI-in-a-Box in a workgroup and active directory environments and I invite your questions or comments as I do so.
Technically Simplified 