This article is part of a series of guest posts by investor, Open Source pioneer and the creator of the Concurrent Versions System Brian Berliner. The original posts, recapping much of what was said at the IDC Virtualization Forum West in San Francisco, have also been published on Brian’s blog.

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At the IDC Virtualization Forum West Conference, John Humphreys, Program Vice President of the Enterprise Platform Group at IDC shared some more detailed thoughts on the virtualization markets (great presentation, BTW).

Further takeaways include:

My thought on the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure topic: Today’s desktop computers are extremely powerful and should not be used as dumb terminals that just do “Remote Desktop†access. You need to find a hybrid approach that allows you to use the power of the desktop client (and all that lovely disk drive space on the client). Once clients start being delivered with a built-in hypervisor (which is not too far away), you could argue that you might be able to treat the client as a server. Then, there is just the matter of managing the Virtual Hard Disk images. Using a CacheFS would be one very easy way to do so (transparent local storage that can be taken offline with automatic server-based backing I/O).

The Citrix folks have an interesting approach to this, including both the ability to “stream†an application load to a diskful and stateful Windows client, OR to deliver a server-hosted virtual machine through a remote protocol connection. Choice. Choice is good, as one size will not fit all customer environments for client desktop management. Check out the Citrix Delivery Center.

[Original post can be found here]