As you might recall from a previous blog post of mine (https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/03/29/perversions-of-it-license-dongles/) one of the show stoppers for virtualization can be USB dongles. Apart from my aversion of USB license dongles that should never be mentioned in the same sentence with reliability and predictability, now the push for VDI has exposed another weakness, the need for end users to have USB access. Well Microsoft seems to have heard us. Take a look @ this blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2010/04/25/Microsoft-RemoteFX_3A00_-Closing-the-User-Experience-Gap.aspx

What remains to be seen is if this will work with license dongles. Anyway for desktop virtualization a much needed improvement is under way. I would like to thank Christophe Van Mollekot from Microsoft Belgium for bringing this to my attention. This together with VDI license improvements for SLA customers are giving desktop virtualization a much better change of being adopted. Some times stuff like this really makes the difference. You can’t explain to your end users that the great super modern virtualized environment doesn’t support the ubiquitous USB drive. Trust me on that one.