The choice between VDI and DaaS starts with a crucial question: How do organizations choose between cloud or on-premises deployment? IT teams must decide if they want to manage the control plane themselves or offload the complexity to a vendor.
When deciding between VDI or DaaS, there are overarching variables and factors to consider, including use cases, data locality, user locality, security, licensing and supportability. IT teams must decide where they want to run virtual applications and workloads: on-premises, in the cloud, or both [in a hybrid model].
Zhao said its important to focus on the use case.
How will your end-users be consuming virtual apps and/or desktops?, he said, suggesting how to access the situation. Is the use case a desktop replacement scenario for 9-5 task workers? Is the use case for a knowledge-intensive group of power users for a short-term project?
Generally speaking, for use cases that require more consistent and dedicated usage patterns, deploying those workload on premises in dedicated hardware makes sense, he said.
On the other hand, for more dynamic use cases where usage patterns can vary significantly from month-to-month, deploying to public cloud may be a better fit.
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Its about understanding and mastering the simplicity-complexity dilemma, according to Aaron Delp, director of EUC marketing at Nutanix.
The complexity of on-prem VDI management historically increases as the environment grows, especially for installations with thousands of end-users, Delp said. Even with this level of complexity, often due to regulatory or compliance reasons, this solution is the right and necessary fit for their organization.
Other organizations may not have the expertise on staff or a need to manage EUC on a day to day basis, he continued.
For them, offloading the management of end users and paying for this as a service unlocks both time and business value for the organization.
Hyperconvergence: The Future of VDI
Given that the worlds biggest work-from-home experiment is kicked into gear with the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly every organization, small or large, is using a hybrid cloud infrastructure in one way or another.
Just like the future of cloud, the future of VDI is hybrid and there will continue to be different deployment models to address different use cases. There will be customers, for security and compliance reasons, who will need to remain on-premises in a private datacenter, and traditional VDI will continue to be the solution for them, said Zhao.
For most customers, however, who will operate in both private and public clouds, DaaS solutions that support hybrid and multi-clouds will be the answer, Zhao said.
That said, VDIs promise of a simple and cost-effective unification of hybrid cloud systems and on-premises data centers is now being fulfilled by hyperconvergence. It delivers compute, storage, and network solutions transparently to the end user while keeping complexity to a bare minimum. This means IT teams can spend less time worrying about the infrastructure and focus on how the workloads running on top of it can add value to the organization.