Virtually Everywhere
Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3. 4 enables secure
desktop access from almost anywhere.
JOHN BLYTHE
Following the availability of Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3. 4, Rich Schwerin,
Oracle Magazine contributor, sat down with
Andy Hall, product management director at
Oracle, to talk about desktop virtualization.
The following is an excerpt from that
interview. Download the full podcast at
oracle.com/magcasts.
Oracle Magazine: How does Oracle desktop
virtualization deliver enterprise desktops?
Hall: Oracle desktop virtualization offers a
different approach to delivering enterprise
desktops to end users. Don’t run the desktop
on the client machines, where it’s insecure,
where it’s tough to manage, where basically
you’re tied to a device. Instead, why don’t
you use virtualization to run your desktop
in a virtual machine in the data center? It’s
more secure, it’s easier to manage, and you
can access it from more places and from
more devices.
Oracle Magazine: Which products comprise
Oracle’s desktop virtualization solutions?
Hall: We have two desktop virtualization
classes: client-side and server-side. A product
called Oracle VM VirtualBox handles client-side virtualization. Oracle VM VirtualBox is one
of the most popular client-side hypervisors in
the world today. There are more than 2 million
downloads of Oracle VM VirtualBox happening
from Oracle Technology Network every month,
and people are using Oracle VM VirtualBox
on their Microsoft Windows PCs, on their Mac
desktops, and on their Linux machines as well.
The big brother to Oracle VM VirtualBox is
Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure—which
is server-side desktop virtualization—running
desktop operating systems such as Windows
in individual VMs on servers in the data center.
And if you’re running your desktops from the
data center, you can access them from your
Windows PC, from your Mac, from your iPad,
or from specific devices, such as Oracle’s Sun
Ray Clients. Sun Ray Clients are an endpoint
Andy Hall, Product Management Director, Oracle
device that are specifically designed for
accessing virtual desktops in the data center,
so they have no operating system, no moving
parts, and are really secure. Finally, we have
Oracle Secure Global Desktop, which provides
secure browser-based access to your applica-
tions and data running in the data center from
wherever you are in the world. The idea is you
start with a browser, type in a URL, log in, and
you get access to the Oracle applications and
other enterprise applications that are in the
data center.
Oracle Magazine: How do system admin-
istrators benefit from Oracle desktop
virtualization?
Hall: If you’ve ever managed a fleet of desk-
tops, you’ve realized that you’re in a very
reactive mode. You’re forever chasing around
and looking to update people’s PCs, you’re
fixing security problems, you’re helping end
users who have gotten themselves into a
bit of a predicament somehow—and that’s
because the device that you’re trying to help
them with is out there in the wild. Effectively
many users are their own administrators
in a traditional PC environment. But if you
move to a virtual desktop environment, the
administrator is able to deliver virtual desk-
tops from the data center. And the way this
works is that the administrator would create
one or more pools of desktops with a golden
template—a repeatable, reusable reference
model. So you can create, for instance, the
golden master Windows template for your
sales team, and another golden master
template for your marketing people or your
engineers, and they can be completely dif-
ferent golden images. Oracle Virtual Desktop
Infrastructure can clone these golden master
images into desktop pools that you can
assign as desktops to end users. So when I as
your end user log in, I am assigned a partic-
ular desktop that the system administrator
wants for me. And when I log out, Oracle
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure has a selec-
tion of features that allows the administrator
to either keep that virtual desktop for me,
repurpose or reassign it to someone else,
or potentially just throw it away altogether
and clone a brand-new one. This means that
you can always re-create and deploy pristine
desktop images to your end users, so you
don’t let them get into a mess.
Oracle Magazine: How do developers
and DBAs benefit from Oracle desktop
virtualization?
Hall: Most developers I know tend to use
Oracle VM VirtualBox on the client side,
because one of the things developers really
want to do is to be able to work from any-
where and to be able to do everything. And
being able to work from anywhere means
that you want a complete development envi-
ronment of clients, a middle-tier server, and
a back-end server, so you can create multiple
VMs on your desktop device, whatever that
might be. Let’s say you’re a Web developer
or you’re developing something in HTML5.
You need to test that against all the different
