Architecture

A recent Microsoft TechNet Flash email links to a Forrester report about what CIOs should be doing in 2015. Part of it mentions hybrid cloud architectures (read Azure) Forrester Research Predictions 2015: CIOs Accelerate the Business Technology Agenda “In 2015, digital disruption will change the nature of competition, forcing firms to obsess about creating superior digital experiences across the entire customer life cycle. Many CIOs have the technical expertise and cross-functional business purview to help drive this level of innovation, but they are too often still seen as nothing more than the leader of a cost centre.

This seminar describes a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) using only open source software (and a Windows desktop OS). This is of course a crazy thing to attempt. You’re more likely to pick an off-the-shelf products like VMware Horizon View or Citrix. The most interesting aspect of this seminar is that it explains the components of a VDI infrastructure and the challenges in making an OS designed for local disk work well in a VDI environment and shared storage.