In my previous blog, I shared my thoughts about how to choose between VDI and DaaS. For the purposes of this blog, let’s assume that you’ve evaluated your needs and circumstances and decided to move forward with DaaS.

Frame started out during the early days of cloud computing, learning to adapt to rapid changes and build features to meet the needs of our many unique customers. We weren’t just built during early public cloud development, Frame was built on the public cloud and has always taken an agile development and delivery approach -- anticipating customer demands and acting quickly to provide new solutions using the latest technology innovations.

It’s 3:00 am and your Incident Response system has sent out an alert… again. Endpoint Protection on a user’s device has triggered an alarm and the investigation begins. Someone clicked a link in their browser and the clock is ticking to contain potential data leakage outside the organization or another round of ransomware is knocking at the door trying to find a way in.

The first three blogs in this series focused primarily on VDI, while the fourth provided a deeper introduction to DaaS. If you've read this far, you are probably beginning to form an opinion about whether VDI or DaaS is better for your company's needs. This time I want to dig a little deeper into some considerations for choosing between the two.

We live in a world where the pace of business is 24/7/365. We also live in an uncertain world where anything can happen—be it the force majeure of Mother Nature or breaking your collarbone during a mountain bike ride. And when disaster strikes, it affects humans personally and professionally. They might, for instance, be unable to commute to work in the event of a railway closure or a bridge collapse. Floods, blizzards, fires, and all manner of natural disasters prevent people from “reporting for duty” as usual. Epidemics hit (as we’re all too familiar with in these past couple months), making it inadvisable to go into work—and sometimes it’s even mandated by the government that people remain at home.

So far in this series, I've talked about the advantages of VDI and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) over traditional desktops and laptops, looked at the challenges that get in the way of VDI success, and examined how Nutanix HCI overcomes those challenges. In this blog, I want to focus on DaaS.

At the end of blog 2, I suggested that—although it doesn't get you out of doing the necessary homework entirely—DaaS provides an alternative way to address VDI use cases, and it also unlocks new use-cases. For many companies, DaaS is simply a better fit than VDI or a complementary technology that can better address specific needs. Read more about the benefits of DaaS.

Designing, building, running, and maintaining VDI in-house can be challenging due to constraints that may include skills, datacenter space, budget limitations, and staffing. IT teams may already be oversubscribed. Finding and retaining experienced administrators with the skills to run a modern—but also complex—VDI platform can be difficult. Adding VDI to your existing mix of applications and services may just multiply your challenges.

What good is your virtual desktop if you can't use your peripherals with it? Imagine not being able to print your documents or not being able to listen to audio from your virtual desktop on your Chromebook. Not only does this limit the virtual desktop experience, but it also impacts your organization's productivity.

I often get asked about what peripherals we support with Frame. So I've put together this blog to update you on the latest supported devices. For the nerdy readers, I'll also describe the innovative approach we've taken to addressing specific use cases like printing or file transfers with virtual desktops. Note that you can also reference this link to the the Frame docs for the most current list as we expand our peripheral support over time.

In blog 2 in this series, I talked about three big issues that can derail a VDI project: poor user experience, excessive solution complexity, and high costs. I also explained why hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is widely recognized as the solution to these challenges. But, when it comes to VDI, not all HCI solutions are the same. Nutanix is uniquely capable of addressing VDI infrastructure challenges and delivering a better overall VDI solution. Virtual applications and desktops are almost literally in Nutanix's DNA. Today we have thousands of customers successfully delivering millions of virtual apps and desktops on Nutanix—all covered by our world-class support. While this blog focuses on VDI, the Nutanix platform supports both VDI and DaaS solutions addressing a broad range of use-cases.

In the first blog in this series, I talked about the main advantages of VDI and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), including centralized management, improved security, and ability to support bring-your-own-device (BYOD). This time, I want to focus on common problems that arise with VDI. We'll look at three big VDI challenges—poor user experience, solution complexity, and high costs.

Xi Frame is a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform built for cloud deployment. It has the ability to provide desktops in a matter of a few minutes on the cloud platform of your choice. With the single cloud-based control plane of Xi Frame, customers can run workloads not only in public clouds but in their own on-prem private clouds powered by Nutanix infrastructure running AHV.

So with the ability to create and manage on-prem workloads with Xi Frame, you get a public cloud-like experience on your private cloud. That’s what the Nutanix vision has always been about. And with the ability to manage both public and private cloud workloads in exactly the same way, we’re also delivering on our mission of enabling enterprises with hybrid cloud capability.