Stacy's Tech Blog

There has been much ado about whether or not to allow users to install their own applications in a VDI environment on Brian Madden’s site here , Dan Feller’s blog here and Chris Fleck’s blog here. I’ve tweeted back and forth a bit, but nothing serious and started pondering the reasons why this appears to be such an involved discussion when I don’t believe it should be. Yes, it does impact design of the solution. Yes, it can increase TCO. So maybe not such a trivial argument at all, eh?

Here are my thoughts and opinions on the matter.

You should ask the questions “Why are you considering a virtual desktop solution” ? What are your business objectives here? Is it for better control of the desktop? Security? Scalability? Is it just plain cool? (yes, this is a reason folks deploy things, surprisingly enough) What is driving the effort?

The very next question to ask is “What do you allow now?” Do you have your workstations locked down such as to prevent local application installation or do the users have quite a bit of lattitude?

And the final question: “Is there a valid business reason to allow this for all, or even some, of your users?” Do you allow it now because you can’t stop it easily? Do you disallow it because the management and policing is too much time spent?

If you answer those questions for your organization, then you’ve likely answered the question of whether or not to allow users to install applications on their VM. And if the question isn’t answered 100%, you at least have a solid starting point from which to move forward.

You can then begin to have conversations with management, IT staff and users on what the solution should be. End users really needs to be part of these conversations, pilots, proofs-of-concept, deployment & user acceptance testing. This is critical to the success of the effort and if you fail to account for this, then you’ll likely be faced with the perception that the project has failed in some form or fashion.

So do you or don’t you? You know, allow users to install their own applications?

Well, only the organization can answer that (see above). And remember, Mr. Architect, in ANY technology initiative: One size does NOT fit all!

I would guess that many organizations will allow some of their users that ability, and some not. So, a hybrid solution is likely to be the case for most implementations, but once again, it really depends on the organization’s business drivers, management capabilities and expectations that will be deciding factors in the debate.