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Bicycles and Virtual Desktops




When I was kid...
We used to go on bicycle trips...
one, two some time three people on one bicycle...
the bicycle trip was more fun with more people sitting on them but painful for the driver.


Sharing a Single user appliance with multiple users is generally painful for the primary owner of the resource.

Let's take the case of Desktop computers. If you carefully analyse a desktop computer, there are three main functions:

1. Access - Keyboard, Video, Mouse, Sound, USB etc.
2. Storage - Harddisk and CDROM
3. Compute - Processor and Memory

Let's take the bicycle analogy again of sharing access - this can be realized by software like VNC Server and VNC Viewer - here One Driver(VNC Server) and Many passengers (VNC viewers) can share the Access experience. In this case the passengers(VNC viewers) are the sufferers. So Sharing the Access layer may not be such a good idea.



The same is not true for both storage and compute. The Capabilities and capacities of desktop storage and compute engines are far beyond the utilization levels of a single user. It may make perfect sense to slice these resources and share them with Access only(thin client) devices.

The concept of conventional VDI solutions has focussed on replacing the Desktop environments with Data center based compute and storage architecture. This mainframe like approach has mainframe like limitations on scalability and affordability.

We(sify team) are are proposing a hybrid Distributed VDI approach by Sharing only the Storage and Compute parts of the standard desktops for Achieving affordable and Sustainable VDI deployments.

The Concept Reduce Compute power, Reuse existing hardware and recycle the access devices is powerful yet simple approach to affordable computing.

The Practical Realization of this approach hinges on the fact that each desktop acts as access device in the environment and is configured to share its:

1. Compute resources
2. Storage Resources



There are equal or more number of access only devices like thin clients that are brokered by a middle ware layer to access the share resources.

We are open to comments and critical review of this idea to perfect it...

Please feel free and flame...

-4thought

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