“It is a waste of time to switch on and maintain 370 desktop computers used in Strathmore University every morning”, says Dr. James McFie, the head of accounts Strathmore Business. McFie who also chairs DataposIT, a technology company that deploys virtualization solutions to organizations, says virtualizing desktop environments brings simplicity in consolidating data and provides a unified storage platform for business enterprise.

McFie said this in a NetApp and DataposIT event, held at the Southern Sun Hotel, Nairobi where a number of industry experts and customers demystified the virtual desktop infrastructure.

Virtualizing the university desktop environment will not only reduce Strathmore’s total cost of ownership on hardware and maintainace but also save on cost of activating software license for individual PCs.

However, according to Riaz Patel a VMware Engineer, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is more than just a product to a concept. The ability to house several desktops in one virtualized server, takes several components, the client, the virtual machines (VMs), an intermediate to connect clients to appropriate VMs and the VMs that are used as desktops.

The environment created by these four components, saves an organization from having several hardware to run different applications. “Organizations will avoid having disparate silos hence reduce cost of owning several hardware infrastructures”, claims Mr. Sunil Varghese, NetApp.

Technology should be thought in terms of the users, with desktop virtualization features like user personalization administrators can embed departmental applications and configure custom settings for the virtual desktops, without the desktops taking up more space in storage.

Mr. Asim Shah from Tarpo Industries, a medium sized company based in Kenya which manufactures tents says with 30 networked PCs, the company had no control over data security. They encountered lots of virus attacks and much time was wasted in maintaining single desktop machines.

In July 2011, the company got a wakeup call when 15 PCs were stolen from their premises which accelerated their decision to invest in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. At the moment their server manages 30 virtual machines and employees are also able to enjoy hot desking environments.

Virtualization in Africa is not a myth; Tarpo Industries have deployed it all over their offices in the region.