This past week I’ve been working on putting together a presentation to the CIO and senior business leadership for our plans for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The presentation will include a short PowerPoint backed discussion as well as a live demo using VMware View. I’ve been working with Scott Reopelle from the Desktop team as his team will be the application owner for the broker as well as continuing the support and development of Desktops no matter the platform.

The PowerPoint discussion will be short and to the point. As always, my method is to use the PowerPoint itself to just list highlights and topics to discuss. I find it boring and tedious when attending a meeting where somebody just reads the PowerPoint they’ve put together. Instead, I prefer to actually do the presentation myself and let whatever is on the screen behind me augment what I’m discussing.

The live demo will be as short as possible as well. The purpose is just to show the concepts of VDI, so we’ll bring out 4 or 5 devices and demonstrate that I can log into my hosted desktop on any device and the experience will be the same. The devices will be a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop, a Wyse V10L thin client with ThinOS, a Wyse X90L laptop running Windows XP Embedded, and a Dell Mini 9 netbook. The 9 will not be connected to the internal network, but instead will be connected via Sprint to the internet. This will demonstrate how well it works outside the company network on a personal device. We might also have an Ipad running Wyse’s Pocketcloud. Scott is reluctant on the Ipad because he really doesn’t want to propagate the idea that they are supported by the enterprise. I can’t say I disagree, but it would be a sweet demo!

By the way, I would link to the Dell gear, but Dell has a habit of killing the links to their products once they are no longer sold. The only links I could find would be support links, but those are not exciting enough to link. Maybe I could use that as an excuse to get a new laptop. ;)