Potential solutions for replacing desktops

[vmproteau]

We have a client that has had a SOHO user environment grow over time to ~30 people. Each user VPNs in and remote controls a workstation in the office (back office type work e-mail word excel etc.). Obviously this is not ideal from a management standpoint.

They don't have an existing ESX Infrastructure or VDI would be my first thought. I think the initial buy in will be too much for 30 users.

I don't know much about VMWare Workstaion but, provided you have a strong enough server, is it conceivable to run 30 instances on one sever? Or is this not what it was designed for?

[oreeh · Accepted solution]

In this case I'd rather take a look at VMware Server.

Anyway: a decent machine with enough memory, enough CPU cores and a reliable storage (maybe even local using a good RAID controller with BBWC) should be able to handle ~30 desktops.

You could even split the VMs across two hosts and this way have some kind of "redundancy".

[asatoran]

If you can't afford VDI, have you considered Windows Terminal Server? If the desktop apps are basic and standard (e.g. MSOffice) then Terminal Server on a single Windows server would work. At my last job, we had a single NT4 Terminal Server box to host a little more than a dozen remote employees. This was an old 500MHz box and the users only used Outlook, Excel, Word and 2 proprietary DOS apps.

You could go either way. As stated with enough storage, a single machine could host 30 VMs. A single TS server could use less HD space and obviously need less RAM since it's a single VM running instead of 30. But some apps don't play well in a TS environment so you'll want to check your apps first.

Just a thought.

[vmproteau]

Yes. Terminal Services was the clients first though and still is a possibility but, as you mentioned there are some limitations. More importantly, I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce them to virtualization on this kind of scale to make them more accommodating in the future.

It's too bad too, they have an application that spans 10 or so servers. All of them were coming off lease a couple months back - a perfect opportunity for an ESX implementation and the costs were in line. I had them convinced to use a pair of ESX servers but, the application vendor said they couldn't support that kind of environment. I think if they had pushed, the vendor would have acquiesced but, they ended up taking the path of least resistance and buying 10 new servers. If they had that Infrastructure in place, VDI would be a no brainer.

By the way, if they went the VMWare Workstaion route, how easily will that transition to a future VDI implementation? Would I just move the VMs into the VDI environment?