One of the many perks of working at VMware is to work with some of the people who have written a (important) piece of computing history. We still have many of the original principal engineers from the early days of the company and few of them even wave at me when I run into them in the hallway 
In all seriousness, these guys walk on water when it comes to software innovation. I happen to manage the product that started it all, VMware Workstation which is now part of the enterprise desktop products and the other day I was talking with some of the original engineers and product managers in the team and we took a stroll down memory lane discussing the origin of the desktop virtualization market.
The History of VDI
I am using the original definition of VDI here, that is the ability to virtualize and run a number of Windows desktops (the whole thing) in the data center and access them via a remote client via a display protocol such as RDP or PCoIP.
2002-2004 – Early Customer Experimentation
The first people to implement a rudimentary version of VDI were actually our customers. A VM is a VM is a VM… and they were just running Desktop Workloads in the data center with point-to-point connection over RDP.
Here is a customer case form Prudential in the UK dated 2002 This was XP running on VMware ESX.
2005 – First Broker Prototype
Jerry Chen got wind of it and ask Puneet Chawla, one of our kick-ass engineers, to build a prototype for a connection broker which was demoed by Diane Greene at VMworld. We also ran a Lab for customers at the event. At the same event, Mark Benson from Propero demoed the Propero Connection Server (now View Connection Server).
Those were the first high profile demos of VDI.
2006 – The VDI Alliance
In April 2006, VMW launched the 1st VDI Alliances Program which was joined by ~50 partners very quickly including Citrix.
The VDI term was born and launched into the marketplace.
Later that year a formal development team was formed under the leadership of Matt Eccleston and Jerry Chen and they were formally asked to build a VDI product.
2007 – VDM 1.0
Throughout 2006 and the early part of 2007, Puneet’s prototype made it into the field and end customers via the professional service organization. In 2007 the product organization took over the effort and turned it into a shipping product called VDM (Virtual Desktop manager 1.0). The VDI Market was born.
The Propero Acquisition
In April 2007 we bought Propero Software to beef up our brokering capability and started building the second release of VDM.
Few months later Citrix officially entered the virtualization market by acquiring XenSource.
At VMworld September 2007 we announced VDI Broker product (VDM 2.0) and Mark Benson (now a VMware employee) presented the first VDM Technical Architecture session.
2008 – VDM 2.0 and View 3.0
After launching a beta in September 2007, we followed it with the release of VDM 2.0 in January 2008.
This was still a market of one until until Citrix formally entered it later that year with the introduction of the first version of their Virtual Desktop product. We got competition. Competition is good for customers as we keep each other on our toes to deliver better and better products.
In December that year, we released the third version of the product and we changed the name of from VDM to View.
2009 – View 4.0 and PCoIP
In 2009 we released View 4.0 featuring the PCoIP protocol which delivered a much better end user experience than RDP.
2010 – View 4.5
At VMworld 2010, we released View 4.5 which was a cornerstone release for us and the market. View 4.5 featured some great new features but most importantly it delivered unprecedented ease of management which fostered bigger customer deployments. Most notably the biggest public virtual desktop reference on record to date: Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi.
View 4.5 also won the product of the year award form eWeek. It was great to be in the company of Apple iPad in the list of the top products for the year!!!
2011 – View 4.6 and iPad Client
Earlier this year we release a minor release of View as well as the PCoIP-Based iPad View Client that has been received extremely well by the market. It took us longer than we wanted for the reasons explained in this other post, but now the gate is open and we will be able to be much nimbler is responding to the demands of the very dynamic client market.
2011 is not over yet, so stay tuned for some great new things coming out of the Vmware View team!!!!
Vittorio
P.S. let me know if I missed any major milestones and I will update this post accordingly
Shanetech
June 27, 2011
I was part of the 2004 early adopters. If fact, even before a virtualized desktop, we stood up physical PCs, enabled RDP and brokered the connection via MSTSC published via Citrix Presentation Server. The data center manager soon had enough of the physical PC sprawl and we opted to virtualize XP on ESX 2.5 still keeping the same Citrix MSTSC broker.
Len
June 27, 2011
This is a great post. I think too much history is lost simply because nobody bothered to write it down.
Ricky El-Qasem
June 28, 2011
I’m pretty sure that Phil King over at EMC gave Prudential the idea. Also VDI marlet had kicked started slighly ealier than 2007. If my memory serves me right Leostream Connection Broker was about in 2006.
phil
June 28, 2011
Great to see this history Vittorio – I didn’t realize that VMware started this market.
vittorioviarengo
June 28, 2011
I though that was why you joined us!!!
pangchen
June 28, 2011
In 2002, I visited Guardian, which was running hosted desktops on ESX Server because they had users (programmers) in India but due to compliance reasons the data had to reside in the US.
Rick
July 30, 2011
Hi Vittorio,
One of VMware’s early VDI partners was Provision Networks’ Virtual Access Suite, now Quest Software’s vWorkspace. They released a commercial VDI product in 2006 using ESX as a hypervisor and partnered with VMware to get major customers for VDI like the US Army Centcom etc. We were one of VMware’s VDI solutions even before the acquisition of Propero.
Up until about a year ago, and it may still be the case, Quest probably had more production VDI seats than Citrix and VMware put together but we don’t rate a mention. Then there are partners like Leostream that didn’t rate a mention either. Since Quest vWorkspace is listed as one of the 3 leaders in the desktop virtualization space by Gartner your omission is unusual.
What you have presented as the history of VDI is at best inaccurate, incomplete and biased. It may very well be VMware’s view of VDI history but it conveniently leaves out a lot of real history. Maybe you should do a bit more research and try again.
regards,
Rick Mack
vittorioviarengo
August 1, 2011
Can you send me pointer to the relevant press releases so that I can update the post. I did a lot of research on this topic but missed Quest. In terms of market share or install base, can you please provide or point me at third party data? The data I have is share here on this blog. Thanks – Vittorio
Kelly O.
August 9, 2011
How about Sun Ray Server out in the late 90′s?
vittorioviarengo
August 18, 2011
Good point. I should probably re-title the post VDI on windows/x86
Richard Keck
October 20, 2011
This is an excellent summary. AventuraHQ.com believes growth in VDI and its first cousin Server Based Computing, SBC is a critical trend in end-user enterprise computing. We’re pleased to be supportive of this trend, particularly in health care.
http://aventurahq.com/aventura-take-tour/