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Planning Deployment of Virtual Desktops

I have a few items I would like to get input on. First off, is VDI now VMWare View?

Next, I am in the planning stages of replacing many of our desktops and I want to virtualize a fair amount of them. I am looking at Thin Clients and I want hardware accelerated PCoIP support. What have you used and how has your experience been with them? Some of them I will need to have a credit card reader attached to it, via USB. Is this something supported on a Virtual Desktop? How about CDROM support? If someone wanted to put in a CD to listen to, how have you gone about supporting that?

What kind of vDesktop have you made? Do you use 2vCPUs or single CPU VMs? How have they been performing? Have you put your Virtual Desktops in the same vSphere cluster as your servers? Or do you have separate ESX hosts for just desktops? I know I should use Resource Pools to keep the desktops from stealing all the resources form the servers.

I know that Desktops have an entirely different kind of load than servers, I know they create a lot more disk activity, but is it enough that I should have a separate cluster?

I can see anywhere from 9 to about 20 desktops I could virtualize, they are basic workstations using Word and Outlook, some Citrix clients, and a few other applications, but nothing to intensive, no CAD or software developers compiliing code. One may be using Photoshop.

9 of them would be over a WAN. I am contemplating placing ESX hosts at each of the WAN sites to host the desktops in those locations, and replicating them back to our main site.

Just looking for experiences of others, any tips or tricks anyone uses, gotcha's or issues anyone has had. And hardware support for USB items, such as the credit card reader I mentioned. And support for attaching CDROM devices.

For the moderators, not sure if this question should be in 'Enterprise Planning & Managing'...

Please, discuss.

-Ed.

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