We have no existing VDI infrastructure, but we need our 100+ developers to run their software development software, debugging tools and scripts that all require local machine admin rights on network-segregated systems without Internet access.
They will have i5 workstations with 16GB RAM and SSD drives. The plan is for the host OS to just run their normal office apps like Office, browsers, IM and other software they can use as a limited user and have their development tools running as a VM on the workstation in something similar to VMWare Player. They would have local admin rights on the VMs, but not their host machine and there would be no network link between the two.
Another option would be to have less powerful local machines, but host their developer VMs on servers such as EXSi. I'm having doubts that the savings on downgrading their workstations would be enough to pay for hardware, software and VDI licensing required to run VMs with similar performance of what they would expect of a physical machine.
The server infrastructure would require terabytes of RAM, lots of very powerful server CPUs, tons of fast disk space, plus the extra costs of redundancy and high availability to keep this setup from being an easy single point of failure. Then you have the costs of virtualization management software and VDI licensing.
Is there any way to run 100+ robustly configured Windows virtual machines suitable for software development and testing in a more cost effective way than running them on workstations as local VMs?
We cannot do outsourced DaaS as we are required to keep the data on premises.
