Host desktops at each remote office or main datacenter.

[mittim12]

VDI is a hot topic in my company at the moment and in my initial planning I came across one big problem. Since our outer offices have their own storage and Server Farms I will more then likely need to have my virtual desktops hosted on that LAN so that I don't push profiles and other network traffic across the WAN pipe.

I wanted to start this discussion to kind of get a feel for what others are doing as far having their desktops hosted locally or remotely in their main datacenter. I know this will be largely dependent on their environment but it's nice to know who is doing what and what kind of problems they have run into with profiles and printing.

[sgrinker]

We went with our primary datacenter, and eventually to be located in our redundant secondary datacenter in the coming year. The majority of the implementations at the moment though are all located in the same physical location as our primary datacenter.

We actually just went through a performance test from each of our regions, which you may want to do similar if you have the opportunity. Basically we sent out Thin Clients to given individuals in each area, and then I walked them through the configuration. I then asked them to run through a series of tests from their standard host workstation, from the VDI desktop, and also our Citrix Desktop. We had them gauge time frames for each operation, and then collected all of the information. We haven't done this in all offices yet, but just started with the different regions. It at least gave us a feel of general user expectation for each of the different desktop environments.

We are beginning a rather large and lengthy consolidation effort as well, so we only expect those times to change as Exchange Servers, etc are moved into the primary/secondary datacenters.

Thanks

Steve

[TomHowarth]

Well you really have got two choices here,

A:- move every thing into the datacenter -

Pluspoint - better for centralisation and you will know that everything is being backed up, very highband width between the hosts. lower employment costs with not having to keep skilled technical staff at remote sights

Minuspoint - nobody works when the council puts a spade through your WAN. more expensive to start with and a lot more planning needed

B: - have local VDI infrastructure, some savings due to reduced desktop footprint. easier to plan, more akin to a PC renewal programme than a major transforamation project, is a good trinsition point, once everyone is running a VDI delivered desktop then moving the resultant VM farm to the datacenter is a much less daunting project.

negatives - Higher cost due to replicated hardware, higher power comsumption due to requirement to have upgraded ACU and computer rooms etc, higher downstream employment costs due to requirement of skilled technical staff on remote sites.

Of course you will be guided by your project business drivers in the direction they whant to go but the above is a starter for ten

[mittim12]

This is definitely the type of information I am looking for and it's nice to see that I am thinking and moving down the correct path.

From my initial findings it is really going to be easier to start off with the local VDI infrastructure. This is due to a magnitude of reasons but the main ones are the existing IT footprint we already have in the remote offices and the need to upgrade the main datacenter to cover the additional Server and storage items. Oh let’s not forget that VDI is just one part of a companywide OS upgrade project so I definitely don'

t want to bite off more than I can chew.

[TomHowarth · Accepted solution]

the advantage of doing it that is that it will be alot eaiser to collapse it back to the central DC once it has the oumph to deal with it.

I have just finished a very similar project, but it was SBC not VDI