Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Note : This page has been translated into English from French by a machine translation tool

The term VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a term that was coined by the company VMWare. It refers to a system that provides access to virtual machines over a network.

But first, what exactly is a virtual machine ? It is in fact through software to simulate the operation of a physical computer and all the elements that make it up (hardware resources, operating system and software) within a real computer or server in order to run applications under the same conditions as if they were launched on a real computer. This way, you can, for example, share the computing and memory capacity of a single physical computer by using it to instantiate two virtual machines that will each use half the resources of your physical machine. This is just an example and nothing prevents you from allocating more computing power and storage space to one machine than the other. This principle can be interesting because it allows you to run a Windows operating system on a Mac, which is very useful if the software you want to use does not exist in a macOS-compatible version.

But let’s come back to the VDI… This infrastructure makes virtual machines available remotely so that you can work from any device, including tablets and smartphones, on applications requiring high computing capacity that your device does not have. It also provides a backup and recovery solution in case of data loss on a physical computer. VDI is composed mainly of two elements : the connection broker and the hypervisor. Let’s see what it is all about…

The connection broker is the intermediary that allows you to connect to the Virtual Desktop. The hypervisor can also be called VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) creates and runs virtual machines. There are persistent VDIs and non-persistent VDIs. The former can be likened to physical computers because the user has access to his own virtual machine that he can back up and reuse. Conversely, a non-persistent VDI could be likened to a computer in an Internet cafe. The user can connect to a pre-configured virtual machine to do a job. As soon as he disconnects, the machine returns to its initial state to be reused by someone else.

The storage costs of a VDI can increase very quickly because of the need to host everything that runs on its infrastructure, from operating systems, software and even data on the data center. In order to reduce these costs, we are seeing the emergence of converged or hyper-converged infrastructures that bring together servers, virtualization software and storage. As previously mentioned, in order to access and operate virtual desktops, users must choose hardware tools that will replace a traditional computer that performs its own tasks. One can, among others, choose zero clients, smart clients, thin clients, fat clients, mobile devices, etc… with advantages and disadvantages for each one. To learn more about these different types of devices, we invite you to read our article Categories of professional equipment.