stephen1977

@ Dave What a refreshing and honest response from someone who made the same mistake as me. VDI is 'the way to go' as to speak. However, rushing into things and enabling a mindset that it will cater for everyone's needs is naive to say the least. Been there and done that. Trying to explain to teachers that they can no longer play DVD's very well was the first blow. Having to then justify to the geography department that they can no longer run Google Earth Pro on this new flashy and expensive system was the next. Ultimately it created more problems than it solved. Especially as regards to supporting the product once installed by the specialists. We all know the score here, being in IT, you are expected to become a master of citrix and Vmware overnight! I'd suggest VDI is the way forward, but careful planning and training of support staff needs to come BEFORE its introduced to the network.

@ Superatticman I'm afraid VDI on standard server platforms is going to struggle to run programs such as sketchup. You will have to invest (heavily) in blade servers with onboard gfx chip emulation to provide applications such as these through VDI. You will then find direct3d/openGL performance will be possible, although the performance will be similair to that of most 2006 era entry level 256mb Geforce Video cards. Reasonable, but nothing to really impress anyone. Please don't tell me you've made the classic mistake of taking the 'VDI for everything' approach then realising a number of applications that most frontline school IT environments require don't actually work very well, or at all! You have have you not? But rest assured, I did exactly the same and fell for the salesman's pitch. VDI has a place in Education and is the way forward, but just be very, very careful before choosing your infrastructure as it will soon end up costing more than standard IT kit.