VMworld Keynote – Day #2

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I have just finished watching Steve Herrod’s keynote – which I must say – I found far more enjoyable than Paul’s keynote yesterday.  I am not going to try and summarize the whole keynote – but I do want to dive in on one part.

There was a section where they talked about their vision for combined online / offline VDI.  The concept here was that a user could have a unified desktop that they used locally on their laptop & remotely on their home computer or mobile device (though I never did figure out why the demo guy needed to connect remotely from his home computer if he had the image on his laptop).

At first, when I was watching this, I was pretty darned impressed.  And do not get me wrong, this is some cool technology.  I am especially interested in finding out more details about VMware’s client hypervisor (as the details become available).

But as I was sitting there thinking “That would be cool! That could really change the way I use computers!” – I realized that, no, it would not change the way I used computers at all.  You see, at Microsoft we have a great terminal services infrastructure for employees to use.

So for me today:

  • When I am at work I use my main desktop (now with 6 monitors hooked up to it and some massive desktop real estate) most of the time.
  • When I get home – I then am able to seamlessly and securely connect to my desktop computer in order to do any work that I want to do from home.  And thanks to the fantastic work by the Remote Desktop team in Windows 7, I get full Aero support and a great multimedia experience doing this.
  • I can also use remote desktop from my mobile devices.

In fact the only downside to this whole setup is what to do if my work desktop is turned off – but then the Microsoft IT team have published most of our standard corporate applications over Remote Desktop as well – so even in this case it is easy for me to connect and do my work.

What are your thoughts on this?  Do you think that the combination of online & offline VDI would revolutionize your work style?

Cheers,
Ben