Brian Madden published a very long and interesting technical essay about which is the best protocol to use in new Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments.
He exposes limits of Microsoft RDP (and its enhancements like the Citrix ICA) analyzing all remoting techniques, and then listing all proprietary alternatives which are appearing on the market (including the new SPICE protocol launched by Qumranet, the virtualization startup behind KVM).
But most of all Brian exposes the information that VMware may be working on dropping RDP completely, looking for a newer, standardized and more efficient replacement:
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There’s a new standard that’s working it’s way through the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) called “Net2Display”. The basic idea is that Net2Display will be a remote display protocol (like RDP, ICA, X, VNC, etc.) that’s purpose-built for remoting entire desktops to remote clients (with full USB support even!). This standard is being developed now (and should be ready very soon), and will be available to for basically any company to use when they build their VDI software/server/client/whatever.
There’s not too much available on Net2Display right now. (There’s a four-page overview that’s very good. Direct link to PDF.) This paper is very recent and even talks about RDP 6. What’s interesting is that the people on the Net2Display committee work for companies we all know in this space: IBM, Teradici, DeskTone, Avocent (the IP-KVM people who are probably nervous about all this remoting), and…VMware!…
Read the whole post at the source.