Let’s start with a simple question: What do you *actually* need in order to do your job?
You need a computer running Windows, and a bunch of applications. That computer needs to be able to take your input (stuff like your keyboard and mouse, or a webcam and microphone) and turn it into output (stuff like your monitor and speakers). Normally, that computer is physically close to you – on or near your desk. But… Does it *need* to be? What if we took your keyboard, mouse, monitor and such, and then we ran a *really long cable* to a computer somewhere else, could you still work?
You could, right?
That’s part one of VMWare Horizon: A way to smoothly implement this sort of thing. Rather than a really long USB cable, everything runs through the network at your office. This allows for really, *really* long cables – with the right setup, it doesn’t even need to be in the office.
But why bother doing this? Well, that’s part two. Instead of everyone getting *one* computer, we make people share a big computer. The computer simulates a bunch of smaller computers. Each computer runs Windows, all your applications, and we use those really long cables to plug everyone’s keyboard and mouse into their own little computer inside the big computer. Windows is just a program, after all – it sends and receives a bunch of messages to the computer. Messages it sends might be something like “calculate this for me” or “store this file in this folder”, while messages it receives might be something like “the user just hit enter”. We can easily catch these messages and translate them a bit so that Windows *thinks* it has access to a normal computer, even though we are just simulating one. The resulting small computers are completely virtual, they’re *virtual machines*. VDI stands for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure – it allows you to have a computer that only exists inside another computer and use it like a normal PC.
Making everyone share a bunch of computers has a bunch of advantages. People don’t use 100% of their computers all the time – they use it in little bits here and there. If you have 200 users, the big computer doesn’t have to be 200x more computer than each user’s little computer. It’s a lot easier to manage and maintain too, everything is in one place for backups and updates. There’s a *bunch* of benefits. If users can handle “running a really long cable into a computer that actually only exists virtually”, it’s great! Some use cases aren’t great for this – a lot of GPUs don’t like virtual machines, the long cable can cause issues and so on – but it’s a great way to save money and make things run more smoothly.
In short: VMWare and other VDI solutions effectively run a long cable to a computer that exists inside another computer.
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