Challenges to VDI Adoption

Even with the benefits noted previously, VDI is still a relatively new technology, and with practically any new technology there are challenges to overcome before widespread adoption can be achieved. One of the primary challenges for VDI has been that, although many applications are very well suited for the VDI environment, some applications do not function nearly as well with VDI as they do in a native desktop environment. Most often this is due to performance characteristics of the application or hardware dependencies. With Microsoft Lync and other unified communications software, performance-related challenges come into play when real-time media workloads are virtualized. Because of this, with Lync 2013 Microsoft has focused on directly addressing these issues in an effort to allow near-native performance for the Lync client when running in the VDI environment. The end result of Microsoft’s efforts is the Lync VDI plugin, which is explored in detail in the following sections.