Addresses Only a Small Market

VDI technology generally assumes users will work on a high-speed LAN that has relatively static desktop images with a limited number of applications and are using thin-client devices. Analysts report that 410 million PCs were shipped in 2010 as opposed to 6 million thin clients.

Conventional VDI does not take advantage of the native performance of a personal computer. Business users usually prefer the access to multiple applications, speed and power provided by full-featured PCs.

Issues with low bandwidth or high latency networks still cause issues, although this is becoming less common.

Applications requiring multimedia (video, voice, Flash) and high performance and 3D applications are a challenge—especially over a wide-area network.

VDI is capital expenditure (CAPEX)-intensive: 20 to 40 users per server plus expensive storage and additional networking equipment.

VDI comes with significant data center power and cooling costs.

It is often complex to deploy, configure and manage VDI infrastructure and protocol.

Personalization either requires expensive third-party software or sacrificing storage and image management efficiencies.

Virtual desktops consume a significant amount of network bandwidth.

Due to its single connection to the data center, there is only one point of failure for employee productivity if the network fails due to a natural- or human-created disaster.