Why VECD is Irrelevant

The Virtual Desktop crowd is salivating at Microsoft’s latest tweaking of the Windows Vista licensing model. Dubbed Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops (VECD), this modification allows organizations to deploy Vista as a virtualized OS image on a centralized server. It also allows Software Assurance customers to deploy the new OS across diskless PCs and thin clients – a model that a niche segment of customers has already been doing with Windows XP (though it’s nice to know that Microsoft is officially endorsing this approach).

Of course, it didn’t take long for VMware to jump all over this new development. After all, it plays right into their Virtual Desktop Initiative (VDI) efforts – a.k.a. their master plan to “rule the IT world” from end-to-end. However, one comment by Microsoft’s Scott Woodgate (in an interview for a competing publication that shall remain nameless) seemed to put a damper on the whole party.

He said, and I quote, “…with VECD, I would be spending up to 10 times as much on hardware to support the same number of users as I would on Terminal Services.”

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by some of my largest customers (various global financial services companies that shall also remain nameless). Sure, they could provision one of their data center boxes to run a VDI scenario – if they wanted to dedicate many thousands of dollars in server hardware to support just a handful of users.

All of which brings me back to one of my core themes in this blog: VDI, like terminal server, is a niche solution for certain non-mainstream compute scenarios. Just as we didn’t abandon the PC in favor of server-based computing, so too will VDI fade as the combination of high hardware costs and the ongoing evolution of traditional “fat” client environments erodes VDI’s already limited appeal.