No more hiding in the server room
I’m looking at VDI. Let’s have your thoughts, experiences and rants!
I’m considering moving a chunk of our users to VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) next year and would like have feedback from the group.
Here is the situation: a few years ago we (like everyone and their dog) had found that supporting desktops had become time consuming and expensive. Time consuming because we had to have help desk people running around (or remoting) to deal with issues local to a particular desktop or replacing failed hardware and expensive because, well, buying a whole pile of desktops to replace everyone’s existing desktop every 3-4 years adds up. And then add in the cost of desktop support tools, cost of end user downtime when something fails, cost of desktop support people, etc…
So the strategic solution I came up with was to implement terminal services and put the bulk (85%+) of our users on thin clients. This has largely been successful. The thin clients themselves are very cheap both on initial cost and ongoing costs. The cost of the server farm in terms of admin time and purchase cost has been less than an equivalent number of desktops plus their support tools.
It hasn’t been all roses however. USB peripheral support is very poor; your keyboard/mouse works but not much else. Forget about any kind of cd/dvd drive and the way RDP presents USB sticks was a bit odd for our users. This didn’t affect most of our users who never used their cd drives or flash sticks but it did for some. Multimedia performance is poor. Again for the most part this didn’t matter as most of these apps are simple 2d apps but for some users this was an issue and it did impact their legitimate business needs. Moreover while most of our apps seamlessly worked with TS not all did and this prevented further TS penetration. It’s frustrating to have a desktop that only exists for piddling minor app xyz.
Recently our thin client vendor is preparing an updates (that we’re beta testing) that add USB over LAN support (thus bypassing RDP) and multimedia acceleration (for flash, mpeg, and wmv). So this fixes large amounts of issues but it doesn’t mesh well with TS and it doesn’t solve the app compatibility problem. We are also coming up to the end of life on our TS boxes and are planning on replacing them.
So I’m considering VDI. This would allow us to continue leverage the advantages of our thin clients and by delivering individual desktops to the end users we could fix the problems we had with USB peripherals and the multimedia support would dramatically improve the end user experience. This would reintroduce some of our desktop woes but given that these are VMs with a short lifecycle these issues wouldn’t be nearly as significant as when we were using desktops. But I’m not totally convinced either … VDI is a newer tech and I haven’t run into many people deploying it in the real world. It adds more complexity then what we had before. We already use virtualization heavily so we are used to that but now we would be even more dependent on VMware; possibly a vendor lockin issue down the road.
So anyone have any experience or general thoughts on VDI? Any thoughts on my specific situation?
Here is the situation: a few years ago we (like everyone and their dog) had found that supporting desktops had become time consuming and expensive. Time consuming because we had to have help desk people running around (or remoting) to deal with issues local to a particular desktop or replacing failed hardware and expensive because, well, buying a whole pile of desktops to replace everyone’s existing desktop every 3-4 years adds up. And then add in the cost of desktop support tools, cost of end user downtime when something fails, cost of desktop support people, etc…
So the strategic solution I came up with was to implement terminal services and put the bulk (85%+) of our users on thin clients. This has largely been successful. The thin clients themselves are very cheap both on initial cost and ongoing costs. The cost of the server farm in terms of admin time and purchase cost has been less than an equivalent number of desktops plus their support tools.
It hasn’t been all roses however. USB peripheral support is very poor; your keyboard/mouse works but not much else. Forget about any kind of cd/dvd drive and the way RDP presents USB sticks was a bit odd for our users. This didn’t affect most of our users who never used their cd drives or flash sticks but it did for some. Multimedia performance is poor. Again for the most part this didn’t matter as most of these apps are simple 2d apps but for some users this was an issue and it did impact their legitimate business needs. Moreover while most of our apps seamlessly worked with TS not all did and this prevented further TS penetration. It’s frustrating to have a desktop that only exists for piddling minor app xyz.
Recently our thin client vendor is preparing an updates (that we’re beta testing) that add USB over LAN support (thus bypassing RDP) and multimedia acceleration (for flash, mpeg, and wmv). So this fixes large amounts of issues but it doesn’t mesh well with TS and it doesn’t solve the app compatibility problem. We are also coming up to the end of life on our TS boxes and are planning on replacing them.
So I’m considering VDI. This would allow us to continue leverage the advantages of our thin clients and by delivering individual desktops to the end users we could fix the problems we had with USB peripherals and the multimedia support would dramatically improve the end user experience. This would reintroduce some of our desktop woes but given that these are VMs with a short lifecycle these issues wouldn’t be nearly as significant as when we were using desktops. But I’m not totally convinced either … VDI is a newer tech and I haven’t run into many people deploying it in the real world. It adds more complexity then what we had before. We already use virtualization heavily so we are used to that but now we would be even more dependent on VMware; possibly a vendor lockin issue down the road.
So anyone have any experience or general thoughts on VDI? Any thoughts on my specific situation?
Views: 9
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Rodd Young on -
Hi All,
I work in a Local Government organisation and we to have been looking into the implementation of VDI for much the same reasons as Zac has stated above. So far the only exception to this for us would be our high end users, ie Engineers that use autocad etc and our Laptop users.
I would also be very interested to hear from others out there that have implemented VDI technolgy, especially any issues with performance, user backlash caused by functionality issues etc.
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Permalink Reply by Isaac on -
Performance in our demos has been a somewhat better then straight TS; primarily because you don’t have as many issues with people running something that eats that CPU. Assuming you don’t have apps that are heavy on graphics it’s ok. We don’t have real backlash to deal with because our users are on TS anyway; if anything they’re happy because of the improved USB support. We have new hires that grumble sometimes but they typically get over it after a week because they see that it’s a perfectly usable environment and they like hotdesking, extra deskroom, and no computer fan noise.
The main issue we’re run up against isn’t technical at all but rather is Microsoft’s licensing. The information we’re getting from MS is somewhat unclear but it looks like we need to buy a copy of Vista Enterprise for every VM and a “Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop” for every VM in addition. This VECD is the real killer because it’s $110 per thin client per year.
In fact MS licencing would cost more than the servers we would run this on! So unless we can come up with more funding or work some deal out on licensing then it may kill this whole project. In the past we wouldn’t have balked at the cost but with the economy I’m tight on money and this feels like MS just charging extra because they can. Like I said it’s not the cost of Vista I object to it’s the VECD.
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