Many companies see VDI as the solution for reducing management costs of their workstation environment. Before VDI can be implemented as a company wide solution 2 big drawbacks need to be solved. First of all the display protocol need to be enhanced to create a "local" user experience on the virtual desktops. Secondly the current VDI solutions out there lack offline support. Especially for laptop users it would be very usefull to take the remote virtual machine offline, work locally with it at home or on the road, and when back in the office synchronise it back to the central datacenter.

Before the end of this year VDIworks provides offline support in an add-on to there current VDP product. This add-on is called VDIworks2GO.

VDIworks2GO uses a check-in check-out system where the users can inform the application that there going offline. The virtual machine is then being downloaded to the local laptop and executed in a virtual machine player like the free VMware player. What's pretty cool is that when synchronising back to the datacenter not the whole virtual machine is being copied back but only the changed parts.

Also VMWare had a similar feature in their VMWare View 3 product, only this is available as an "experimental" feature and is not supported in production environments.

For more information about VDIworks2GO and there complete VDP product click here.
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