Frenzied Wombat
Potato del Grande
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I work at a state college - I would not want out staff / faculty computers to be VDI ever - never ever.
What seems to be our first proof of concept is to take these kiosk's all our students sign in at for student services, such as advisement, fin aid guidance etc. and replace them with a thin client streamed the kiosk app via remote app. This POC can be done on our current hardware - yet my VP et al know that if we where to do anything more it would involve buying more hardware for the back end - and eventually they would need to hire another "me" to work with me to support this infrastructure.
Me and my other teammates have already told them that hard costs are basically a wash- but as I said we are in a odd financial time - there is some law or whatever that states only X% of $ can be spent on staff/faculty we are 1-2% over - so we have to make a plan to show how we are getting that back into the proper % - so if we say that we are going to not replace 3 lower level tech support jobs once they quit/retire/promoted and hire 1 higher level tech - that's a savings of 2 benefits $ and + 20-30k for the salary difference - even if the hardware costs behind that are more $ - because its not staffing $.
So its a do more with less people kind of thing - this is going to happen across the entire org - people that have been here 30+ years and are making 30-40% more than base will be given a nice reason to retire, so on and so on - they never fire anyone (we didn't do any layoffs during the 09-ish crisis) its just plans on how we are to shift the % down to make it inline with what we should do.
This RemoteAPP and VDI stuff is just what I am involved inWhere I would like to see thin clients with a full desktop steamed to them would be in our student labs, beyond that and a few nice cases for remote app - no, replacing the user desktops with it is just adding pain.
The problem is that the argument that VDI will lower staffing costs is also a fallacy. The reality is the infrastructure required to properly run VDI requires advanced ongoing tuning and troubleshooting. Unlike a desktop where you just have a PC to troubleshoot, VDI involves your physical hosts, clustering, VMware, SAN, core switch, and FC and/or iSCSI switches. One firmware/driver change can FUBAR your entire farm. Though you technically can now make do with less helpdesk people, instead you need (typically) multiple high end people to maintain the aforementioned infrastructure, because chances are your VMware guru isn't the same guy that will troubleshoot FC issues on your switches. Let me tell you that when the shit hits the fan and your entire client farm is down you'll seriously rethink the decision. Nobody pats you on the back for saving a hypothetical X amount of dollars per year for switching to VDI (even if true), but they will be breathing down your neck when nobody can work and you're pouring through logs trying to figure out what's wrong.
VDI was originally conceived as an economical way to deal with helpdesk costs associated with desktop/hardware failure-- basically eliminating the need for an "end user desktop visit". However back then SSD's didn't exist, and neither did fanless CPU and video cards. Hard drive failures and burnt out fans were common. Today, the desktops I buy from HP are fanless except for the PSU and come with SSD's-- I think we've had one hardware failure in the last two years, and that's with 200 or so desktops.
In your case (students) VDI DOES make sense, but only because its functionality is actually beneficial to that type of environment. But if you think it will reduce work, risk, stress, or cost for IT you're in for a big surprise.
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