Persistent or non-persistent desktops

In this section, we are going to talk about the different types of desktop assignments and the way a virtual desktop machine is delivered to an end user. This is an important design consideration, as the chosen method could potentially impact on the storage requirements (covered in the next section), the hosting infrastructure, and also which technology or solution is used to provision the desktop to the end users.

One of the questions that always get asked is whether you should deploy a dedicated (persistent) assignment, or a floating desktop (non-persistent) assignment. Desktops can either be individual virtual machines, which are dedicated to a user on a 1:1 basis (as we have in a physical desktop deployment, where each user effectively owns their own desktop), or a user has a new, vanilla desktop that gets provisioned, built, personalized, and then assigned at the time of login. The virtual desktop machine is chosen at random from a pool of available...