Virtually Hosting Desktops

There are a lot of ways to help telecommuters connect to resources at the mothership (aka the Real Office). Many people use VPNs to form a secure connection, and from there use a variety of ways like XP Remote Desktop through ye olde firewall to access servers and other stuff. Other people might use GoToMyPC to get in, and then have a free for all. Or maybe you're a twice a week telecommuter, and you save up all your writing tasks and put the files you need on your laptop in preparation for your work-at-home day.

All these solutions have one thing in common: they require double-PCs (which may not lead to double-happiness). Or you're not really accessing the real stuff on your network. Okay, that's not one thing. But you get the idea. This business of having to have a PC inside the firewall and a connection machine outside the firewall could eat into the mythical "You'll save a bunch of money if I telecommute full time" argument that Stella believes is so appealing to employers.

Enter virtualization. Much like you have a host of golden dafodils ... er, I mean virtual servers blooming on your servers, you can likewise host a host of virtual desktops on a server. Or 40. Whatever, the point is that VMWare proposes that you could have a bunch of wimpy thin clients and virtual machines and make better use of time and space than with loads of zombie PCs waiting for your telecommuters to connect.