Presentation Virtualization: The Virtualization Technology that Isn’t

This is a sidebar to the article, "Virtualization from the Desktop to the Data Center."

A technology that Microsoft likes to lump into its virtualization definitions is Presentation Virtualization, or as it’s more commonly known, Terminal Services (or its newer name, Remote Desktop Services—RDS). Although it’s probably good marketing to attempt to include the older Terminal Services technology under the virtualization umbrella, calling it a virtualization technology is something of a misnomer. With RDS, a remote console window can be displayed on a network-attached system. That’s about as virtual as it gets. The remote desktop session is actually interacting with an underlying physical system, and you’re connected to the remote system exactly as if you were using the local display and keyboard.