A lot of the recent blog entries here have been about Oracle VM VirtualBox, possibly the coolest personal desktop virtualization product known to man. Deploying VirtualBox on your PC or Mac lets you run many virtual desktops at the same time to one user, you.

But did you know that VirtualBox can also power an Enterprise-scale virtual desktop deployment too, delivering many desktops to many users? 

As part of another Oracle product, Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), VirtualBox can run your Windows, Linux or Solaris desktops on servers located in the datacenter. Oracle VDI orchestrates the whole deal by looking after :

• creating or cloning the virtual desktops from a master template;
• managing the lifecycle of the desktops (create, start, suspend, resume, stop, delete);
• assigning which users get which desktops; 
• delivering easy and fast access to these virtual desktops from almost any device, such as existing PCs or Macs, iPads, or specially designed Sun Ray client devices too;
• load balancing and session management of all of this.

 Architecturally the solution looks something like this:

This is an increasingly hot area of the IT landscape, so the Fat Bloke has decided to create a new blog category (VDI) and dedicate a few blog entries to look into this in a bit more detail over the next few weeks.

Watch this space...

- FB