To VDI or not to VDI

[CAWJames]

Morning all,

 

We had our monthly IT meeting yesterday and the question of staff PC refresh came up. We first decided that 30 PC's would cover replacements and a certain amount of future proofing. BUT then someone piped up that this would be about the £20k mark in shiny new boxes, is there a better way?

 

In a simple world, use the old computers as thin/fat clients and invest in server side technology, ie VDI

 

In the past I was a user and one time re-seller of Citrix technologies, even having a working desktop on my work phone over gprs in 2003!!

 

Is this the way to go these days? We have EES, so VDA should be covered by SA under that agreement.

 

This would only be for the FTE count, but who knows, BYOD desktops on student devices?

 

Any insight into this? VDI-in-a-box has been slated for the chop(although not for a time yet) with no replacement on the horizon(no pun intended), so what other options are there? We licence System Center, so ***-V technologies could be an option.

 

Thanks

 

James

[Steve21]

The problem we found is unless you're going "heavy" usage site wide etc, that the costs to setup/license/replace failing kit (old kit still needs maintenance etc) it's not viable on a small scale.

 

I mean depending on specs you're after etc we've just got some i5/4G/SSDs for £360~ so what £11k~ for you. Are you likely to get all the licensing/hardware etc in and setup for that price? Not really. Now scale that out to 500+ (random figure) then ok yes.

 

Guess it's more a what's your future goals/plans, is VDI in this, or is this just a "we need cheap replacements now" kinda comment from "the someone"

 

Steve

[CAWJames]

Thanks for the reply,

 

We have 100 odd staff, around 50 concurrent, spread across a hub and spoke VPN on at least 10 meg leased lines at 4 UK locations. We also have 10 people at anyone time logging in from home, we also have a few hundred student use PC's around the centres too(not to mention 100's of netbooks, that would benefit from a nippy server side desktop), to give you a better idea of size.

 

Its not really a question of cost, just what is the best way to spend that 20k! In terms of home workers and people of site at other centres, and simplification of admin tasks, VDI sounds like a winner, but I still need to do all the comparisons and ask the right questions. A server to handle at least 100 VDI desktops will not be cheap, then there will be licensing of course. To be honest I do not know how far £20k will get us in the VDI world. I used to deal in Citrix Presentation Server, and that wasn't peanuts!!

 

Thanks again

James

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Morning all,

 

We had our monthly IT meeting yesterday and the question of staff PC refresh came up. We first decided that 30 PC's would cover replacements and a certain amount of future proofing. BUT then someone piped up that this would be about the £20k mark in shiny new boxes, is there a better way?

 

In a simple world, use the old computers as thin/fat clients and invest in server side technology, ie VDI

 

In the past I was a user and one time re-seller of Citrix technologies, even having a working desktop on my work phone over gprs in 2003!!

 

Is this the way to go these days? We have EES, so VDA should be covered by SA under that agreement.

 

This would only be for the FTE count, but who knows, BYOD desktops on student devices?

 

Any insight into this? VDI-in-a-box has been slated for the chop(although not for a time yet) with no replacement on the horizon(no pun intended), so what other options are there? We licence System Center, so ***-V technologies could be an option.

 

Thanks

 

James

 

£20k for 30 PCs? Crikey! I can do shiny refurb HP Elite 8300 with Ivy-bridge i5, ssd and 5 year warranty for around half that!

[howartp]

We first decided that 30 PC's would cover replacements and a certain amount of future proofing. BUT then someone piped up that this would be about the £20k mark in shiny new boxes, is there a better way?

£20k for 30 PCs?

 

£666 for a PC is nearly double what we pay for ours.

 

(Ah, ICT_Dave beat me to it!)

Edited May 28, 2015 by howartp

[CAWJames]

Ok yes, 20k is on the high side. but we use £700 as a ball park for admin PC's, usually an i5 with a large adjustable screen and a second smaller screen. It usually come in much cheaper when I go out for quotes, but it gives us a standardised figure to work with in speculative conversations!

 

Hope that makes sense of our arcane ways here in the land based sector!

[howartp]

with a large adjustable screen and a second smaller screen.

Blimey, don't let my staff hear you saying that!

 

They all get a fixed-height 19" screen, either 4:3 or 16:9 at their preference (assuming we've got one in, or it's due for replacement anyway).

 

(Tech department make blocks for lifting screen if necessary for H&S)

 

Peter

[CAWJames]

Health and Safety rules here, considering we are semi-medical training Vet Nurses. We even have a physiotherapist visit once a month for staff(ok we have to pay, but we get the time for it)

[ITGURU]

Never have virtualised desktops here. I had to support a network for 6 months before a merge with out network and Citrix was a nightmare. Constant daily reboots as clients couldn't connect, not load balancing properly , stuck profiles on the servers - may just have been the way it was set up.

 

Always used fat clients - only 1 PC can go down at any one time rather than a whole class full if a fault occurs. Only virtualisation I have is a few servers, but vast majority are physical boxes still. gets the performance and reliability I need.

[Axel]

You needn't go "full VDI" - "standard RDS (previously terminal services/RDP) would be a lot cheaper and nowadays does pretty much everything Citrix did/does....

 

Microsoft are announcing a lot of nice new features in the the latest versions - one of which is running multiple codecs in the same connection,

for example running H264 for video and standard RDP for text in the same session - so you get the best of both worlds in terms of performance....

Edited May 29, 2015 by Axel

[NotSoFast]

Interesting point Axel. Do you know how many concurrent users a terminal server can support nowadays? Or what sort of spec would be necessary for 30/60/90 users?

[CAWJames]

After a 'fishing expedition' we are looking at vWorkspace from Dell Wyse, and XenDesktop. They mentioned a price for the Dell platform with server, I mentioned education and OVS and he said discount could be hefty, we will have to wait and see!