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CHAPTER 1 An Introduction to End-User Computing (EUC) Concepts 15 These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. advent of flash storage and the introduction of hyperconverged infrastructure — which, together, removed much of the hardware complexity inherent in the solution. In a VDI environment, users interact with a complete Windows desktop environment, dedicated to them, depending on the con- figuration. From an interface perspective, VDI doesn't look any different from a physical desktop interface, so the transition is smooth and application compatibility issues largely go away. However, the complexity in the underlying VDI software has remained. That is probably the biggest downside to VDI. Getting it absolutely right can be difficult, even with the easiest hardware available. Even though VDI looks a lot like server virtualization, there are some critical nuances. First, whereas server workloads are gener- ally very different from one another, desktop workloads are gen- erally very uniform. This may sound like a positive, but it isn't, at least from a performance perspective. VDI administrators need to be careful about how many desktops they load into a single host server and they need to keep peak workloads in mind. VDI gave rise to the terms boot storm and login storm because these activi- ties caused VDI hosts to buckle and there were stories about users waiting minutes for login processes to complete. These problems don't exist, for the most part, in traditional desk- top environments. At inception, VDI was looked at as a potential cost saving measure, too. After all, if you could just buy terminals rather than complete desktops, that had to save money, right? Those early hopes were quickly dashed as any potential savings was eaten up by the need for new storage and the software licensing associated with VDI. You can learn all about VDI in Chapter 2. Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) With the rise of the cloud also came the rise of a complete spec- trum of "as-a-service" offerings. These welcome additions to the enterprise IT landscape have made it possible to very quickly and very easily deploy most new services without a lot of heavy lifting needed from IT.