From Mary Jo Foley:
Since April, it’s been quiet on the Windows 8 leak front. But here’s a new tidbit to keep the “what’s next for Windows” faithful going for a bit longer.
Blogger Charon at Ma-Config.com unearthed a slide presentation from a Microsoft architectural summit held in London in early April of this year that focuses on virtualization futures. (As Microsoft watchers may recall, new virtualization capabilities are expected by many to be part of Windows 8 when it ships around 2012 or so.) There’s only one slide in the deck that explicitly calls out the 2012+ “Windows Next.”
But the deck still gives some general sense of what the Softies are thinking on the Windows client virtualization front.
The Microsoft solution architect presentation, entitled “Desktop as a Service,” describes some of the customer pain points associated with Windows today. From notes that are part of the slide deck:
Customers today “see application compatibility issues, they see DLL hell, they see an inability to manage efficiently, they see high costs associated with maintenance and upgrades, they see a relatively short lifespan…..This cannot continue. Customers are increasingly refusing to let this continue.”
What could alleviate these problems in a single bound? Virtualization technology! Or — to reflect the deck’s messaging more accurately — a panoply of virtualization technologies.
Microsoft already offers a number of virtualization technologies — Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI); application virtualization (App-V, MED-V, Remote Apps, Terminal Server), OS virtualiztion (Remote Desktop, Terminal Services, VDI); data virtualization (folder redirection and synch); hardware virtualization (Hyper-V), plus various System Center management offerings. While many are touting VDI as the holy grail, VDI is not the same as desktop as a service (DaaS), according to the Softies, and DaaS is more than just VDI.
Here’s a slide that shows how Microsoft is thinking about the next-gen virtual desktop:
Interesting article..Article Tags:desktop as a service · SaaS · Windows 8 · Windows 8 Development · Windows 8 Speculation · Windows 8 WishlistArticle Categories:Microsoft
