Of late I have been realising that less and less people consider desktops when the create their DR plans and processes. When you virtualise your servers, apart from the obvious benefits we always associate with server consolidation it becomes a DR enabler. So the next logical step is a business continuity plan. People talk about Recovery Point Objectives for the business and tier service levels to accomodate the RPO within the budget.

The key thing that people often miss is the desktop connectivty associated with the DR/BC strategy. It is fine to have a killer DR plan that enables all of your key infrastructure and services to be running in a heartbeat via SAN replication or VM level replication. But how are those end users going to connect ?

VDI

That is the answer, we all know what VDI is in principle. In fact VMware didnt even have a boxed product to sell you for VDI until they went out and bought a connection broker. The simplest form of VDI is a workstation running on your ESX infrastructure with a RDP connection to it.

How much easier can it be to resolve connectivity issues at your disaster recovery site for your staff in the event of a disaster if all they have to do is find an internet connection and RDP into virtual workstations running on ESX ?

When you are considering purchasing that infrastructure for the Disaster Recovery site, think about the workloads associated with running x amount of virtual machines on it. Then you do not need to consider how you are going to find x amount of physical workstations to get up and running.