Great Seminar with Brian Madden, Dell and Nvidia

Attended a great seminar at Citrix Summit with Brian Madden, Dell and Nvidia discussing how VDI - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure has changed in the last 10 years and how the concept will affect the future. Brian's comment that VDI will only make up 10% of most I.T. infrastructures is 100% right on the money. Today, and for the near future, VDI is still too expensive for every use case. Only specific use cases such as high end 3D graphics / AutoCad (this is where Nvidia comes in) and hyper converged computing (Dell) is where the market will grow for now. Both Nvidia and Dell have addressed this requirement and have brought technology to the market to provide the infrastructure needed. In the meantime, the rest of us will continue to use XenApp to virtualize our applications and shared desktops. A Windows 2012 R2 server with XenApp can be presented to end users and look like a Windows 10 desktop without the user even being aware. The cost for virtualizing the server for multiple users is way cheaper than presenting each user with their own VDI desktop. But don't fret, you can still place the Nvidia card into the server (as with VDI) and share the hardware GPUs with each user and provide high end graphics performance. Plus, with Dell's hyper converged solutions (such as PowerEdge FX) you can achieve local desktop like performance with XenApp and XenDesktop.

The future is here for computing and it looks pretty darn bright!