A lot of fingers have been typing about VDI (that's virtual desktop infrastructure) recently. If you're wondering what the fuss is about, the short answer is more than 50 million PCs were shipped last year, which makes it an interesting market for vendors and for organizations that are trying to manage these resources better. Some big players have made noise, such as Citrix (which already has a solution called Presentation Server, err, XenApp), Microsoft (ditto with Terminal Services) and VMware.

The basic concept of VDI is that there are a number of benefits in server virtualization that organizations would like in their desktop infrastructure. To name a few: simpler recovery from hardware failures, centralized management, security... So are there any organizations that are deploying VDI broadly?

In our experience, many organizations are placing desktop infrastructure in the data center for at least a subset of their total environment. We see a lot of Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix XenApp in our customer base. We're also seeing early evidence of VDI deployments. For smaller user environments, VDI can be as simple as deploying Windows Vista in a virtual machine and connecting using a thin client. We see this a lot in dev/test environments and smaller organizations.

As the environment scales, it's important to think about managability. Brokers can help organizations deploy and manage their virtual desktop infrastructure. I just read a blog over the weekend that describes how to deploy Virtual Iron and Provision Networks to create VDI. And there are other brokers that support Virtual Iron as well, such as 2X Software.

While you can't take your virtual desktop on the plane with you -- at least not yet -- think about VDI the next time your laptop or desktop experiences an issue. You can restore a backup to a virtual machine and be immediately productive. You may find that you don't want to go back.