Perhaps less well known is how Sun has combined VirtualBox with our Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and stateless Sun Ray thin-client technologies to offer a highly integrated, low-cost virtual desktop solution. Sun showcased this technology at this year's JavaOne conference in San Francisco by hosting 21,000 virtual machines with the choice of Windows 7, Ubuntu Linux, or OpenSolaris desktop environments. Even more impressive is that Sun managed to support this entire environment with only 2 system administrators.
As enterprises embrace desktop virtualization as a way to improve security, lower administrative costs, decrease hardware footprints and increase server utilization, VirtualBox combined with Sun's VDI and Sun Ray technologies should be on the short list of candidates for those on a limited budget and especially for those interested in creating a Windows Desktop as a Service offering with support for remote clients attaching over the public Internet. VirtualBox's built-in RDP support allows remote RDP clients full access all the way down to each guest Virtual Machine's console. Sun's VDI infrastructure communicates with the client using RDP but talks to the Sun Ray Thin-client using the highly efficient ALP Sun Ray display protocol which greatly improves display performance over WAN distances. Together, these features provide unique advantages both for enterprises and for this emerging desktop service business model.