Kevin Vogl has overseen hundreds of desktop virtualization deployments as vice president of virtualization for systems integrator Champion Solutions Group Corp., out of Boca Raton, Fla.

And he's seen his share of desktop virtualization design-stage mistakes, a common one being the creation of too many desktop images.

Eager to satisfy the diverse needs of the user base, some enterprise IT departments end up designing hundreds or even thousands of virtual desktop images - voiding a major benefit of desktop virtualization, simplified desktop management. And it typically starts with one group of users and snowballs.


"I see enterprises that take a small group of users and instead of giving that group one or two images, they end up with six [images] because a few people in the group use an application that the rest of the group doesn't," Vogl said.

Instead, applications that are unique to a few users should be delivered separately through application virtualization, he said.

User boot storms also are often brought up as a storage-allocation or network-capacity nightmare that can be avoided during the design stage. Shared memory, available these days in most virtualization products, allows the first image of Windows 7, for example, to be loaded only once. Shared memory technology voids the need to load memory for that image the next time a user boots up Windows 7, Vogl said.