VDI in medical settings is popular, say John Hoang, Solution Architect, Barbara MacKenzie, IS operations and infrastructure manager at Sydney Adventist Hospital in Australia, a 300-bed facility using VMware VDI products.

One impediment to adoption was enabling single-sign-on for doctors and other clinicians making rounds who have to use multiple different Samsung zero client endpoints per day depending on what ward they're on, Hoag says. "Clinicians don't want to be obstructed by logging in and out 60 times a day," he says. "If it takes a minute each time, that's a lot of minutes."

He's trying out a badge system made by Imprivata that allows the workers to tap the badge and call up their virtual desktop at a new location with all their apps logged in so long as they have already established a VDI session somewhere on the network.

MacKenzie says it's important as organizations deploy VDI to certify in-house expertise so routine problems can be handled quickly and economically.

Sydney Adventist is expanding to a new building that will host a teaching facility that will be used by two different organizations, so classrooms will have dual use. That seems like a perfect use of VDI, but because it is an educational setting, Hoang and MacKenzie expect it will pose unique problems so they are seeking advice from that community.