Apple to be the First Viable Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)?

To give some background, I’ve been in the IT industry for many years and have had the opportunity to work with many emerging technologies in that time. One of which was the rapid expansion of virtualization with solutions such as VMware.

In fact, a team I worked with was using ESX 1.0 in the data center and developed a linked clones solution that dramatically reduced back-end storage requirements making VDI a possibility. These are now standard in the VMware product suite.

I digress… It has always been a push for me to see the doing away with the traditional desktop PC/Laptop and have a VDI solution. However, technical limitations and costs make this a preventative solution unless it is wrapped in a business continuity plan to keep people working that would result in dramatic losses in revenue if staff aren’t working. This isn’t the usual case, and the argument of saving time is seen as a soft-cost to financial controllers. In short, VDI usually dies before it starts…

However, I am a keen Apple product user and a HUGE light bulb came on for me the other day. Apple will be the first commercially viable VDI solution in our very near future.

Here’s how… Apple has been pushing the iPad and iPhone mobile devices and many of the interface features we see in the iOS have been incorporated recently into OSX Lion. Also, Apple has introduced the AppStore to all of these devices and the development language is basically identical across each.

Now this is the secret sauce and I’ll put it all together… One feature in OSX Lion is feature state and document recovery much like we have in Time Machine. Also, Apple’s iCloud solution allows for your app purchases to be shared and installed across all platforms that are supported.

This was the “bingo” in my mind.

Now here is the vision I see Apple going. That application state information is now saved into iCloud. At this point, you would have applications that are standard across all the various platforms and you have the information state of each app in iCloud as well.

Imagine this now. You are working on a Pages document on your MacBook at the office and you need to go to a client. You do a “gesture” and the document flies over to your iPad with the exact same state you had it in to work on, say during a train ride downtown.

You get back to the office, and “gesture” the document back to your MacBook. Seamless integration.

So what do you have? You have a higher powered Laptop to do more intensive applications and portable device to use for more mobile specific applications or perhaps those intensive applications, but in a limited feature set.

Add on to this AirDrop and you can also share files from your iPad to a client’s MacBook or iPad with a simple gesture.

If I’m on the mark, this will be the first and most viable VDI solution in the market. It will also be an amazing revolution to how we work.

Cheers
Aaron