DaaS vs. IaaS for Desktops
May 7, 2013
Grazed from Virtualization Review. Author: Elias Khnaser.
Let’s continue the cloud conversaton that I brought up in last week’s blog, but this time on another topic that has garnered steam in the last few weeks among my customers: Desktop as a Service. Customers are now asking, why DaaS instead of VDI? I don’t want to turn this blog into a comparison between them and this fight has been discussed to death in other forums. Still, I’d like to highlight a few things that DaaS needs before it is a viable alternative to VDI. The biggest hurdle is Microsoft licensing. At the moment, the company doesn’t have a Service Provider License Agreement for its desktop operating system products and that means customers have to provide their own Microsoft licensing to their DaaS provider. I have a problem with that — without one, it gets very complicated, even more so than VDI Besides, it then is no longer provided in an "as a service" model.
Here’s another hurdle: DaaS providers are delivering Windows Remote Desktop Session Host desktops and accessorizing them with a Windows 7 theme, and that presents its own set of challenges with apps and other considerations. There is also the concern with data ownership and compliance. Most important, DaaS would be limited to SaaS applications or Windows applications that are self-sufficient, meaning they don’t need access to the corporate data or back-end databases. These are just very quick nuggets of some show-stoppers that I see at the moment…
That being said, I believe DaaS will eventually surpass VDI adoption once some of the obstacles are addressed. However, one alternative I have not heard many discuss yet is IaaS for desktops. I believe it will be the most popular and cost-effective solution. With DaaS, you lose a lot of control over customization of desktops, and management flexibility, which is understandable. Service providers cannot have an unlimited number of change requests, as that becomes a nightmare to manage and support…
Read more from the source @ http://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/virtual-insider/2013/05/daas-vs-iaas-desk.aspx