What is a Virtual Desktop?

A Virtual Desktop is a technology that allows users to access a desktop environment, such as a Windows desktop, from a remote location.  A Virtual Desktop offers advantages to businesses with remote workers, or that have multiple sites, and need to share business applications, files, databases, and documents.   A Virtual Desktop enables employees to access their work desktops and applications from anywhere, using any device.

 

What is a Virtual Desktop used for?

Businesses use Virtual Desktops when they want to run shared applications such as accounting systems, CRM systems or Office suite.   Traditionally the users would all have been in the same office and they would have used an on-premise server to store the application database and other files.  Remote workers or workers in other sites would have needed to use complex and expensive network technologies to connect in, and performance may not have been comparable with on site workers.  By using Virtual Desktop environments, organisations no longer need to purchase, support, licence and maintain their own servers, and they can ensure all members of their team have high performing systems that can be used from wherever they are.

 

What are the benefits of Virtual Desktops?

When researching what is a virtual desktop and what are its benefits the primary benefit that springs to mind is flexibility.  There are of course many benefits of virtual desktops and these include:

• Flexibility: users can access their desktops from any location over the internet and also using non-Windows devices such as Apple Mac, Android, iPad, and Chromebooks.
• Cost Savings: No need for physical servers and their associated power, licence, support, maintenance and upgrade costs.
• Security: Management of virtual desktops is centralised with policies in place to reduce cyber security risks. Hosted Virtual Desktop providers should have industry standard credentials such as ISO 27001 to ensure security best practices are followed.
• Scalability: Virtual environments offers the ability increase or decrease resources based upon actual need and demand, unlike physical servers where resources are fixed and inflexible.
• Risk mitigation: Virtual Desktops offer easy recovery from disasters such as ransomware, or inadvertent misconfiguration. Recovery from backups will be quick and easy compared with trying to recover a physical server.
• Desktop Management: Virtual Desktops are managed to control what users are able to do on them for security reasons.  A user may be prevented from installing applications themselves to reduce the risk of malware for example.

 

What are the types of Virtual Desktop?

At a high level there are two types of Virtual Desktop that a business may consider, those deployed and managed by the business itself, on its own hardware, and those deployed on cloud-based 3^rd party services.

On premise or self-managed virtual desktops

Larger organisations and those with access to either in house IT teams or specialist IT support providers will generally opt for one of two types of Virtual Desktop:

VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

With virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) the environment is split up into lots of virtual machines with an operating system per user.  This set up is part of a broader Virtual Desktop Infrastructure that includes all the necessary hardware and software for desktop management and to support the virtual desktops.

VDI offers advantages if individual users need different specifications of virtual desktop.   A power user running many demanding applications, needing more RAM and CPU, may have a different specification than a user just running one light weight application.

The management of user settings is done in one of two ways:

1. Persistent Desktops: The user settings, things like internet history, passwords, recent files, cookies, display settings etc. are retained between sessions for each user.
2. Non-persistent Desktops: These virtual desktops do not retain settings after the session ends, they may be used for “kiosk” type solutions where data does not need to be stored on the desktop or is purely held within the application that is being run.

Remote Desktop Services (RDS)

Remote Desktop Services (RDS) is a technology written by Microsoft that enable connections to a single Windows computer by multiple people at once to run the same applications.

Remote Desktops offers benefits over VDI as only one operating system is needed and only one installation of the applications running on it.  Application upgrades only need to be performed once on the server to apply to all remote desktops.

To the end user a VDI environment and a RDS environment will look and behave very much the same.

 

Hosted Virtual Desktops

A Virtual Desktop hosting provider is a company that has its own multi-tenant or public cloud VDI or RDS environment.  They work the same as an on-premise solution except that the hosting provider will look after the support, maintenance, setup and upgrade of the entire environment.   Economies of scale brought upon by hosting Virtual Desktops for hundreds or thousands of businesses mean that typically these solutions will work out cheaper than self-managed solutions, especially for smaller businesses.

 

Desktop as a Service (DaaS)

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is another name for hosted virtual desktops where a third party hosts the infrastructure of a VDI or RDS deployment.  These will often be persistent Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solutions.

 

Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure Virtual Desktops is a Microsoft services that provides a comprehensive Virtual Desktop solution using Microsoft’s Azure platform, where much of the infrastructure required for Virtual Desktops is managed by Microsoft, just leaving the Virtual Desktops themselves to be supported by the end customer or their IT support company.

Azure Virtual Desktops have both scalability and optional geographical redundancy to offer high availability for organisations where reduced risk of down time is an imperative.

 

Virtual Desktop Hosting Providers

Where Azure is an environment to run virtual desktops, it requires specialist skills to setup, configure, and maintain it.

A virtual desktop hosting provider is a fully managed services that provides both the underlying physical hardware of the virtual desktop system as well as creating, supporting and maintaining that environment.

 

What is a Virtual Desktop hosting providers role?

A hosted virtual desktop provider will typically provide the following functions:

• Initial creation and set up of the environment for the end customers
• Maintaining all the “behind the scenes” infrastructure that helps to support the virtual desktop environment, including security, backups, managed updates, antivirus, monitoring and alerting systems, firewalls, gateways, certificates and much more.
• Managing the licences for products like Windows and Remote Desktop Services.
• Supporting the platform and fixing technical issues that might arise.
• A good virtual desktop hosting provider will also help architect a full solution for a customer that includes systems beyond the desktop itself, For example, additional back-end servers such as SQL database servers, web servers and application servers that provide the full system infrastructure that a Virtual Desktop environment needs to support the specific business applications running on them

 

What is a Virtual Desktop comprised of?

Virtual Desktops run on Virtual machines (VMs) which are software-based emulations of physical computers.  Unlike physical hardware a virtual machine (VM) can be easily modified.   Many dozens of VMs can run on individual physical machines, and automatically moved to other physical machines in the event of a hardware issue or for maintenance.

Windows Desktop and Windows Server

Virtual Desktops may run desktop operating systems like Windows 11, this is typical for VDI solutions, or on Windows Server operating systems which is the norm for RDS systems.

 

Summary

Virtual Desktops offer a powerful and flexible way of running traditional desktop applications in a cloud-based virtual environment.  While many applications are becoming web based, the reduced feature set and slower performance means these may not always be suitable for modern businesses when compared with desktop applications.   Being able to run these feature rich desktop applications in the cloud means that whether the virtual desktops are VDI, DaaS or RDS they are an essential component of today’s business IT landscape.

 

To find out more about how Virtual Desktops can help your business please contact us using the form below.