By Samuel Msiska

As companies keep on growing, the amount of data is also increasing exponentially with time. Data that is so large and complex that traditional data management tools cannot process easily is called Big Data. Facebook, for example, receives more than 500 Terabytes of data every day. This requires advanced analytical tools such as data mining, which can help in extracting data to generate business insights and large server capacity to store the data. Smaller companies may not experience such a huge volume of data, but even the small amount of data they receive can cause data management problems. Storing data securely requires a server and most of the data analytics software needs great computation strength. This involves heavy investment in on-premise IT infrastructure. Desktop visualization is a technology that is helping small and medium companies to reduce costs of buying and maintaining their own IT infrastructure. Allow me to fascinate you by looking at one of the ways desktop environments can be visualized using a technology called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

The new generation of computing

Gone are the days when people would carry their physical computers when traveling. With the development of desktop visualization, one can access their desktop remotely anytime no matter where they go. For those that do not know what desktop visualization is, this is a technology that creates a virtual version of a desktop environment and operating system on a remote server. The virtual desktop can be accessed by a user using the internet. Desktop visualization comes in two types: persistent desktop visualization and non-persistent desktop visualization. In persistent desktop visualization, a user can organize their desktop and save changes for future use, the same way they would do on a physical device while non-persistence desktop visualization consists of a pool of desktop environments a user can access however, they cannot customize the desktop and save settings for future use because once they log out, the desktop restores to its previous state. One of the typical ways desktop visualization can be deployed is using the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) model. In VDI, a desktop operating system like Linux is hosted on a server located in a data center. This allows end-users to access their desktop on any device using a web browser or a secure application as long as there is internet connectivity.

Basic components of VDI

VDI consist of four components:

•  Visualization
• Hypervisor
• Connection broker
• Desktop pools
• Application virtualization

Let`s look at each of them in a bit more detail.

Visualization

This is a technology that creates a virtual version of the hardware, operating system, server, or storage into separate layers. Before visualization, all the components were embedded together thus, failure of one component would affect the other. For instance, if the operating system crashed, all the files would be lost.

Hypervisor

Hypervisor is software that separates the hardware from the underlying operating system. Multiple operating systems can be installed on the computer the hypervisor is installed. A virtual environment is made by the hypervisor in which the underlying hardware can be partitioned into several Virtual Machines (VM). Each VM can have a custom Operating System and applications. The hypervisor creates desktop instances in each VM which can be shared with end-users as separate desktops.

Connection broker

This is software allowing the end-user to connect to their virtual desktop instance. The Connection broker also performs other functions like authenticating user credentials, assigning users to remote desktops and turning remote desktops on and off as needed.

Desktop pools

The desktop pool is a group of virtual desktops with the same configuration settings such as the same Operating System and applications. In an organization, desktop pools can be created for departments like Finance, IT and each desktop pool will have applications and configurations specific to the department. For example, the IT department can have NetBeans installed in their desktop pool and this will appear only to users in the department.

Application virtualization

Application virtualization is a process in which a parent virtualized application image is mirrored to all the virtual desktops in the desktop pool. It makes the process of installing applications easy by replication what is on the main computer, the host, to all the guest computers.

How VDI works

The end user logs in to a virtual desktop via a secure client application. The connection broker receives and analyses the request and sends the user to their desktop in the desktop pool if the log in credentials are correct.