Many companies have turned to virtualization technologies for their servers and in their data centers to simplify administration and to reduce management chores and operating costs while maintaining reliability and safeguarding against disasters. Seeing the significant benefits virtualization delivers in those environments, companies are now looking to apply the same technology to their desktop computers.

The idea behind what is called a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is to run desktop operating systems and applications inside virtual machines that reside on servers in the data center.