With no hard drives or CD-ROM drives to break down, thin clients carry one-quarter of the capital expense of a full-scale PC. Plus, if for some reason a user's desktop stalls, the entire troubleshooting process consists of rebooting it off the central server. No wonder hospitals increasingly are turning to end-user virtualization to provide doctors and nurses with desktops that will follow them on their rounds.

Norton Healthcare, the largest health care supplier in the Louisville, Ky., region, is among those hospitals sold on virtualization. According to a recent InformationWeek report, "The five-unit acute-care hospital chain and supplier of 11 neighborhood clinics is in the process of providing 1,000 thin clients to end-user end points, such as nursing stations, clinic treatment centers, and 50 physician offices. With three shifts a day, most end points have three different users every 24 hours, noted Brian Cox, director of IT customer services."

Since implementing VMware's View in place of Citrix Systems' Presentation Server, Cox has been able to let doctors and nurses move around the hospital and still access their desktop from the closest thin client, often at the nursing station of a wing instead of having to go back to their own desks. Their desktops can be summoned from any location and used to enter patient information or to look up patient records.

Although virtualization adds a server expense that would need to be factored into the total cost--and virtual desktops on thin clients still require certain tweaks--Cox feels the leap to virtualization positions hospitals for the future in a tough economy, with IT that's much easier to support.