


VDI requires a high capital expenditure (CapEx), especially if you need to purchase or upgrade servers or prepare a data center facility. When you purchase a DaaS subscription, if not specified otherwise in the agreement, you are still required to manage your virtual desktop images, your applications, and the security of your workloads. Next, the cloud vendor starts managing the back-end tasks, including data backup, security, upgrade, and storage. First, you purchase a subscription, which defines how many virtual desktop instances you want to use on a monthly basis. The PoD is isolated from other systems, to ensure any desktop fluctuations do not interfere with other workloads located in the data center.Ī DaaS architecture, on the other hand, serves VDI using a multi-tenant delivery model. Typically, VDI technology uses a dedicated point of delivery (PoD) model, which contains predefined network, compute, and storage resources dedicated to supporting a specific number of virtual desktops. The connection broker serves as a layer that authenticates each user, rather than an endpoint device.

The hypervisor enables you to serve multiple virtual desktops from one physical server.Ī connection broker is a software gateway in charge of connecting desktop users with individual desktop instances. The main components of a VDI architecture are a hypervisor and a connection broker.Ī hypervisor decouples any physical hardware from an operating system (OS) residing in a server, which is located at the data center. See a head-to-head comparison between a popular VDI and DaaS solution in our article: Windows Virtual Desktop vs. DaaS: What is the Difference?īelow we cover some of the key differences between on-premises VDI and cloud-based DaaS services. All infrastructure setup and maintenance is handled by the DaaS provider. With DaaS, organizations do not need to provision servers or manage VDI infrastructure-both hardware and the VDI control plane is fully managed by the service provider.ĭaaS systems are subscription-based, usually billed on a per-user basis, with little or no initial investment. The IT department has full control over the VDI site and can keep sensitive data on-premises.ĭesktop as a Service (DaaS) is a cloud-hosted VDI service, offered by providers like Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google, VMware, and Citrix. This means that hardware, software, licenses and distribution are all handled internally. VDI is centralized, so the IT team is responsible for managing the infrastructure. It involves setting up servers in the local data center, running virtualization software and virtual desktop management infrastructure, from providers like VMware or Citrix, and has high upfront costs. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is the traditional way of serving virtual desktops to corporate users. What is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)?
