In order to migrate a user's persona, it must first be decoupled from the desktop operating system. In a completely coupled scenario, the user's persona resides inside the operating environment of the physical desktop.

The following figure is an illustration that shows the characteristics of a physical desktop:

In the preceding figure, the operating system, applications, and user persona reside within the same environment. There is no application virtualization (for example, VMware ThinApp) or Persona Management solution (for example, ProfileUnity) in place. The first step toward successfully migrating the physical desktop in the preceding scenario to a fully functioning vDesktop is to separate the persona from the operating environment.