VDI - Anyone doing it?

the_Grinch

At my last company we had some customers who were doing it to some degree. Most were logging into Citrix and launching their apps from there, with one getting a full Citrix desktop to work out of. What has everyone's experience been with this? Also, has anyone done the full blown dumb terminal with a virtual desktop (be it Windows 7 or XP)? If so, how was the experience from the management and end user point of view?

ptilsen

I have a client that uses almost entirely RDS, with a few specific users getting virtual workstations. Almost everyone is on thin clients. The virtual workstations are only for specific applications that use custom hardware or software that I didn't want to install on the RDSH farm. This is by far my best, happiest client. The experience is fast, stable, tightly managed and secure.

I don't really see the RoI for doing VDI exclusively in 99% of environments. Unless you have to have it over an RDS/Xenapp deployment due to hardware or software requirements, there's not much reason to pick it. The storage overhead alone is ridiculous (think 10GB minimum per workstation), there is pretty much no licensing savings, and even the hardware savings are negligible, in many cases -- I would contend that the server costs of providing an organization virtual desktops would actually exceed the costs of full-blown physical workstations, in most cases.

I'm a big believer in session virtualization (RDS/Xenapp) and highly skeptical of VDI.

vCole

I've used Pano Logic devices with VMware + Windows XP. We only had done about ~10 of these and the results were ok at best. Mostly because the storage wasn't configured properly. From what I've heard, since I've left the company they've finally taken my advice and are seeing much better results.

it_consultant

the_Grinch wrote: »

At my last company we had some customers who were doing it to some degree. Most were logging into Citrix and launching their apps from there, with one getting a full Citrix desktop to work out of. What has everyone's experience been with this? Also, has anyone done the full blown dumb terminal with a virtual desktop (be it Windows 7 or XP)? If so, how was the experience from the management and end user point of view?

I have only seen this in wide deployment when dealing with large medical companies. My small offices have to get into their EMR/EHR programs - many of which are not web based. Recently we were migrated from a direct connection with the meditech client to a VDI interface for one of the hospital systems in Denver. Without a doubt the VDI interface is better. Meditech workstation still sucks though.

the_Grinch

Thanks for all the info guys! New job is talking about possibly doing this for what amounts to sales people in the office. Almost all of their apps are web based, but I foresee a lot of hurdles having to be jumped to make it work. Do I like the concept? Sure. But liking the concept and having it actually work to the extent you'd like (especially in the area of cost and user experience) is a whole another animal.

benbuiltpc

We're using VMWare View 4.5 in a small computer lab for a public library. Devon TC5 thin clients w/ PCoIP. Very good performance, pretty solid too but they still don't behave exactly like desktops. No way to adjust the mouse sensitivity either. That was one reason why we had to go with traditional desktops for the larger lab.

cisco_ma

I work for a school district and we just replaced 4000 PCs with Wyse thin clients this summer. We have 22 schools and all staff at these buildings now get their Win 7 desktop through Citrix on their thin clients. VDI has so many benefits and we realize the management benefits everyday, but if something happens in one of your datacenters and desktops can't be brokered for whatever reason, your end users will find themselves with out any computer to use and can become very irritated...

xenodamus

Let me preface this with the fact that I'm a Desktop Support Supervisor, so I'm only involved in the VDI backend to a limited degree. Having said that....

We've deployed over 300 (and counting) Wyse thin clients running fully virtual desktop sessions in the hospital I work for.
We have a VMware infrastructure hosting virtual XP machines that are delivered to thin clients using Citrix Xendesktop. It's working out very well for us, and we are continually looking for opportunities to replace more of our 1500 remaining PCs with thin clients. We use them primarily for nursing and physician workstations on the hospital floor, where all they need is access to their charting application and our intranet. We haven't gotten into assigned, writable images in our production environment yet.

They require alot of work and buildout on the front end, but once they're perfected and running you never have to touch them. We have about 5 different XP images being used by various departments. I'm actually in the middle of replacing all of our rolling laptop carts with wireless thins on battery powered carts.

Since we're using locked images, every time a thin reboots it gets a brand new session from the cookie cutter. It's nice to be able to resolve any virus infection with a reboot. (We don't even run an antivirus on them because of that.) If you have any questions I'm glad to answer what I can.

it_consultant

the_Grinch wrote: »

Thanks for all the info guys! New job is talking about possibly doing this for what amounts to sales people in the office. Almost all of their apps are web based, but I foresee a lot of hurdles having to be jumped to make it work. Do I like the concept? Sure. But liking the concept and having it actually work to the extent you'd like (especially in the area of cost and user experience) is a whole another animal.

If their apps are web based then putting the infrastructure in to do a full VDI implementation is overkill. I have deployed thousands of Windows based thin clients with a small flash drive (for temp files, print queue files, print drivers etc) where the employees almost solely use Internet Explorer. Works great. If they need access to thick applications, we have a terminal server.

it_consultant

xenodamus wrote: »

Let me preface this with the fact that I'm a Desktop Support Supervisor, so I'm only involved in the VDI backend to a limited degree. Having said that....

We've deployed over 300 (and counting) Wyse thin clients running fully virtual desktop sessions in the hospital I work for.
We have a VMware infrastructure hosting virtual XP machines that are delivered to thin clients using Citrix Xendesktop. It's working out very well for us, and we are continually looking for opportunities to replace more of our 1500 remaining PCs with thin clients. We use them primarily for nursing and physician workstations on the hospital floor, where all they need is access to their charting application and our intranet. We haven't gotten into assigned, writable images in our production environment yet.

They require alot of work and buildout on the front end, but once they're perfected and running you never have to touch them. We have about 5 different XP images being used by various departments. I'm actually in the middle of replacing all of our rolling laptop carts with wireless thins on battery powered carts.

Since we're using locked images, every time a thin reboots it gets a brand new session from the cookie cutter. It's nice to be able to resolve any virus infection with a reboot. (We don't even run an antivirus on them because of that.) If you have any questions I'm glad to answer what I can.

Why do people run vmware then xendesktop? This is a serious question, having done a couple of these bake offs; If you use xenserver Citrix practically gives away the xendesktop and xenapp licenses.

Daniel333

We deployed it a couple places.

My experience...
Too expensive
Video issues
Way too much support trouble with things like skype, WebEx etc.
Customers start blaming every problems on the VDI

We started really pushing Macs after that. Customers are happier but raw support hours were about the same.

darkerz

We deployed a few hundred thin clients running Windows Embedded CE, they fetch resource/VDI from our VMWare farm/cluster/that magic place with the LED's, creates an instance for that user and their permissions in a Windows 7 Virtual Desktop, applications loaded as if it were a fat client (Non VDI machines use Citrix), and it works great.

If you are not doing video intensive, conferencing, or anything outside of inputing data, 2D applications and excel.

And when it breaks, the whole place goes to crap.

And it's expensive.

elTorito

We're currently transitioning to a VMware View desktop environment (600+ desktops), running Windows 7 Enterprise as the guest OS. Performance is decent, as long as no intensive video or multimedia work is being done.

Tuning the front- and backend systems for the current level of performance (= decent) has been tough, and the up front investment on server hardware, storage and licensing has been steep, but I suppose there are some benefits to be had. It nice to be able to provision 500 desktops with the press of a button, and within the timeframe of 1-2 hours.

From an end-user perspective, feedback has been mostly negative. Most people don't have a clue about a VDI environment's inherent limitations, and expect top-tier performance for everything from office work to multimedia. Sorry bub, no 1080p HD video and 7.1 surround sound for you.

From a management perspective, I already mentioned being able to very quickly provision an entire organization's worth of desktops. Other benefits include easy applications deployment, patching and an environment that's very easy to secure.

xenodamus

it_consultant wrote: »

Why do people run vmware then xendesktop? This is a serious question, having done a couple of these bake offs; If you use xenserver Citrix practically gives away the xendesktop and xenapp licenses.

I'm not completely sure, to tell the truth. I know that our organization was using Citrix application virtualization long before we started virtualizing servers. When they went after the servers, VMware was the choice for one reason or another. We're so deep into both of them now, that they just decided to build out the VDI that way as well. Our old Citrix guy used to say the same thing about Xenserver, though.

ptilsen

it_consultant wrote: »

Why do people run vmware then xendesktop? This is a serious question, having done a couple of these bake offs; If you use xenserver Citrix practically gives away the xendesktop and xenapp licenses.

The same reason people run Windows Server on VMware and Hyper-V (Microsoft does give away the licenses for Datacenter and Enterprise on Hyper-V). Vmware is overall a superior virtualization solution, and people want to use it regardless of what the guest VMs will be doing. I'm not disputing that Xenserver and a Hyper-V both have their place, but an organization that is standardized on ESXi is unlikely to go with other solutions occasionally when it makes sense.

it_consultant

ptilsen wrote: »

The same reason people run Windows Server on VMware and Hyper-V (Microsoft does give away the licenses for Datacenter and Enterprise on Hyper-V). Vmware is overall a superior virtualization solution, and people want to use it regardless of what the guest VMs will be doing. I'm not disputing that Xenserver and a Hyper-V both have their place, but an organization that is standardized on ESXi is unlikely to go with other solutions occasionally when it makes sense.

If you are already into VMWARE (like most of my clients) then use vmware view or something. What I don't understand is using the xen desktop (which is awesome) with VMWARE. If, like xenadamus stated, you were already in bed with Citrix before you virtualized, then Citrix should be your answer. Compatibility with xen desktop is built into the xenserver platform and having baked off both, it is better to run xen desktop on top of xen server. The virtual performance is better, the video acceleration is better, the licensing is a little bit less ridiculous, both products are supported by the same vendor etc. Plus it is easy to integrate xenapp etc if you so choose.