jamesfed

667mhz RAM and 120W dual core CPUs? Seriously?

Worth a try Either way sounds like some good times ahead!

and a possible drop in G7

This is where I mention Gen8 being 2 months away

Having used them the DL165 G7s are great - one thing to watch out for are they only have a B110i RAID (no RAID5) - adding in a P410 uses up the low profile expansion slot leaving just 1 16x slot. As far as I understand the B110i isn't supported on VMWare/XenServer at the moment so you would need that aditional P410 if you want to run either of those two (if using local disks to boot off). Other than that they are great bits of kit Consume very little power - dual socket with support for 384GB RAM.

So how many users/PCs would be in use (max/min at any given time) at each of your external sites? Also what services would you want them to have access to that are hosted at your main site? (File Access/Intranet/ect)

Bit of reading for you- AD DS: Read-Only Domain Controllers Branch Cache in Windows 7 | TechNet Edge Re Branch Cahce (which is great btw!) you do need to be on Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 to use it

VPNs between each site in that case (although you may wish to have a long look at leased) - how many users are at each site?

No experiance with Multipoint but I would imagine Microsoft only support it on Hyper-V - either way someone else will soon chip in.

They have come a fair way in the past few years (after the dodgy RAM stick days) and now that they are using Sandforce on their PCBs things are looking up. Heres a link to a post I did about it on my blog - What happens when you put a OCZ PCI-E SSD in a server? | my world of IT Will do another update sometime in April when we move our current and new VDI server onto these drives.

By external what kind of distances are you talking? If its short enough to run direct fibre then easy enough. If not then you are into VPN/leased line terrtory - again easy enough to do just needs a fair amount of work to be done. Depending on number of users you might host a DC/RODC at each site.

Server cost - £1100 5x8GB RAM sticks - £575 OCZ RevoDrive PCI-E 3x2 240GB - £400 (we have tested this drive with VDI and are using one in a production enviroment at the moment with no issues what so ever in the past 3 months - OCZ utils are reporting none of the spare blocks have been used yet and the performance is 100x better (random IO) than our 4x15k SAS) Add in a little extra for a HDD or 2 to boot of and boom £2,200.

A HP DL165 (1U rack) with 1x12 (2.4ghz) core processor, 44GB RAM and a PCI-E SSD would come to about £2.2k as well - none of this Intel stuff here and it would do full on VDI. We run our current 20 seats off a 8 core 2.0ghz with 44GB RAM and 4x15k SAS.

The latest figures we have had (based around 30 VDI seats) were around- £178/thin client (10zig with 3 yr warranty) £4220 - HP DL385 G7 - 2x16core AMD Opteron, 80GB RAM, 240GB OCZ PCI-E SSD £100/VDI lic with upgrade protection for 3 years (£55/VDI lic without any upgrade protection) Personaly I would mix it in with App-V as well which is dirt cheap from Microsoft. The VDI software is Citrix VDI-in-a-box and it uses the same HDX protocal as XenApp does.

+1 for Milestone XProtect Express - fantastic bit of CCTV software

We use a HP DL385 G7 for our VDI server hosting 20 VDI images - including thin clients, lics and all hardware cost was ~ £9,000. At the moment our server uses 4x15k hard drives however will be swapping that out for a SSD soon enough.

Some on here might say that 4x7,200 rpm drives would be ok (and to some degree I would agree in that we have a simlar setup) however after spending so much money on the server (in the CPUs ect) it is a shame not to see a few 300GB 15k drives in there for OS partitions of your servers. Personaly I see it as- SSD - Expensive but perfect for OS 10/15k - Use for OS partitions only 7,200 - Use for data partitions only Anywhos I would put the drives in a RAID5 array (max storage that way with redundancy) - assign 40 GB to the Hyper-V OS partition (could get away with a little less if you use server core/hyper-v server) and then the rest to your VMs. We quite hapily run 6 VMs on a server with those kinds of drives but you should look to get some faster drives. The CPU and RAM arn't going to be the bottleneck in this case.

What is the speed of your drives? We have a pair of HP 165 G7s with a single 8 core CPU - it runs at less than 20% cpu usage most of the times so the 32 cores would be a bit of overkill (although we are looking at one of them to expand our VDI server side kit).

Yep I think for VPN/Remote Access they are just going to be using the tools in Windows Server (especially now that Direct Access looks like it can work behind NATs). I would hope that they come up with something else for web filtering but I'm not holding my breath.

Various reasons that would bring us totally off topic (main one being we spent £65 on TMG + £350/yr for web filtering it works and I don’t want to spend any more than that)

Intresting times ahead! I'm still trying to figure out what happens when Microsoft ditches TMG support now that it is almost 100% that there won't be a future version (and no I don't want a smoothwall!!).

Would be intresting to see what Cisco are going to be up to over the next few years in this kind of space as well....

+1 about backup recovery plan from @m25man - this is not a time to pray to the edugods!

Intresting twist - so long as the very useful info on there (comes in handy with App-V now and again)

Does it have some kind of variable bitrate set?