Paris, 17 November 2009
More than a passing fad, workstation virtualization is turning out to be an issue of strategic importance for many businesses and a very wide range of other users. Already well-established in the public sector, local government, and private and public hospitals, workstation virtualization is now increasingly demanded by training providers.
There are many reasons for this trend, organisational as well as technical. One of the key reasons is the distributed structure of many training establishments and the large number of software applications that they use. This leads to significant complications and compatibility problems between different software releases (PowerPoint and Excel are good examples).
These are problems felt particularly severely by providers making off-site visits and who offer an
ad hoc service. Another factor that explains why training professionals are so keen on virtualisation tools is the ability these offer switch rapidly from one OS to another, without changing the configuration of the training room workstation.
Bear in mind that training establishments generally house a large number of PCs, but that these are rarely identical and rarely kept up to date. In order to ensure a minimum level of consistency, most training professionals reformat all the workstations prior to each session and reinstall them manually, or with the help of a third-party tool. Aside from the risks of mistakes, this can be a complex and very time-consuming operation, especially if large numbers of machines are involved.
This is an important point, and one that explains the attraction of workstation virtualization tools to training centres, which generally need to provide centrally configured desktop environments to suit particular trainee profiles. Once the profile configurations are defined, it only takes a few seconds to install hundreds of workstations, and all without leaving the administrator's PC. This is particularly of interest as previously defined and archived training masters (templates) can be deployed very simply, instead of having to ask a technician to make a site visit; workstation virtualisation makes very significant inroads into deployment times.
Workstation virtualization continues to make its mark, thanks to the real productivity gains that this technology brings. Meeting functional, administrative and organisational needs, workstation virtualization will quickly become standard throughout the training sector.
