If you are trying to justify implementing a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, you should look beyond cost. That advice from members with VDI experience who participated in our recent Virtualization WebForum.

Guy S.: What we like about VDI is that the user’s data is more secure. It never leaves the data center. It is redundant. It is backed up. We don’t have single points of failure. We had an issue with one of our higher end users where they were running out of resources on their VDI. They were running out of resources on their physical PCs. We gave them a VDI with more power and they ran out of resources on that. Instead of having to redo everything I just powered their machine down, gave them more resources and brought them back up. They were done. So it is automated. It has lowered our cost per incident on the VDIs.

The only real issue that a lot of people don’t think of with the VDI is if you are going to use a physical PC for the access to your VDI the cost per user is about twice that of a regular physical PC because you have to support and license two Windows environments.

So I have deployed Wyse thin terminals and mobile clients as well in our environment. So you have got to think of the entire solution from the time a user comes to work and accesses it until they time they shut down, what is their environment going to be like.

Eric W.: I would kind of mirror what had been said by Guy. Thanks that was great info. We did the same thing. It was kind of where you are already in bed with them so we were a heavy VMware shop. We actually did a proof of concept with Citrix with using VMware ad the Hypervisor but using Citrix as the management platform. Again we looked at the licensing. The end result was we couldn’t sell it to management based on the up-front cost because it was tough to make it through that first hurdle.

So I would say anybody that is looking at VDI, what they have to do is, you have to close your eyes to that initial purchase and then look further into the intangible costs which Guy brought up which talks about the ongoing management of those users and those workstations is significantly easier. It is hard to attach a cost to that sometimes but usually that is where you are going to see it is just with the ongoing management. Once you are using it, it is much easier to justify the cost but that initial outlay of say $100,000 for licensing and hardware products.

Guy S.: One of the things that I have done to get a cost wrapped around those intangibles is I went through our ticketing system and I found out how many tickets an average user opened per year and how many man hours went into those tickets to resolve those. That is what I used to wrap a cost around the supporting of users. With the Wyse terminals and even taking into account when I back up a VDI onto Avamar how much does that cost me? So I have taken that cost into consideration.

I have looked at the RAID storage on our SAN array. All of these things I have taken down and I have put into the total cost of the VDI. With a Wyse terminal or any other type of thin client we are breaking about even. We are showing about 2% savings per user. So if you thinking that VDI is the magic bullet and you are going to save x-amount of money because you don’t have to buy PCs anymore that is not the right way to look at it.

Eric W.: Another good thing to add on to that is even beyond just day to day management what we have done both on the server side and the desktop side is we have looked at what it does for your BCP and your disaster recovery that now all you need is network access and you now suddenly have access to every virtual workstation verses having a physical set of work stations offsite. Same with servers that you can do a lot better protection with it through the virtualized technologies.

We were lucky enough that we actually got a deal with VMware. I think it was about 18 months ago that they ran a deal that if you upgraded to enterprise plus they gave you 50 free licenses of View along with it. So we actually upgraded three of our two processor licenses and we were able to bring on 150 VMware View licenses and then we have just maintained the ongoing 20% maintenance on those. So that is how we kind of ended up doing that. We haven’t gone full production with it but we are just on the cusp of using it both for active production and for BCP resources.

Phil: From what we have heard the initial investment at the front end of VDI doesn’t generate a lot of savings verses buying new PCs.

Guy S.: Yes, you are absolutely right. If you want to look at it that way you’re absolutely right. But that PC is a single point of failure, it is not backed up. You are relying on users to store stuff out to the network drives. So yes, if you are comfortable with multiple single points of failure, you got it.

Phil:   But you go for the long term benefits of scalability, easy management and DR.

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