Re: VDI for small company
Hi Porco Rosso, the first question we have to answer is "what do you mean by VDI?" If you just want your users to log into something over RDP, grab a desktop and have a Windows computing experience, you don't need to give every user a VM to do that. You can probably get away with one (I would normally argue two, just for paranoia's sake) Windows Server instances done up with Remote Desktop Services.
For small deployments, I use RDS where I can, because the licensing on "real" VDI is fearful. You can use Liquidware Labs's UEM software to do most of the "really neat VDI stuff" that you would want without even having to buy the expensive VDI licenses. This includes migrating resources between VMs and physical systems, including application settings for applications that don't migrate. It's complicated topic, but - as luck would have it - Liquidware recently commissioned me to write a whitepaper on the topic, which you can find here: http://info.liquidwarelabs.com/Whitepaper_UEMFormLandingPage.html
If I were to design your environment blindly (and without more information it's pretty blind!) I'd say "go buy a VMware Essentials or Essentials Plus kit (depending on which features you feel you need), get Windows Datacenter licenses for all the servers you need and use Veeam to back it all up."
VMware Essentials is cheap cheap cheap, like $500 for 3 servers. But you don't get HA or any of the other really nice toys for that. That's okay, but all you really care about is the fact that it gives you access to the backup APIs. The chances that you need HA for 10 users is pretty small. Hardware doesn't fail that often, and - to be perfectly blunt - you'll run a business just fine off of a single physical server (which runs multiple virtual workloads) and using Veeam to back that up to something like an ioSafe (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/02/setting_the_iosafe_214_on_fire/) NAS.
This gives you full disaster proof storage. It gives you expandability (you can add nodes to your cluster as you grow,) and you can fit a lot of workloads on a single modern server. But the server a Windows Datacenter license so you can have as many Windows VMs as you want.
Virtualise two copies of Windows Server for Remote Desktop Services and spin up a third to act as an RDS gateway. This way your users will be load balanced between the two VMs, and you can take one down for maintenance while only affecting half your users. Or, since it's datacenter, spin up 10 server VMs, one for each user! (Don't forget you still need 10 RDS CALs, no matter how you spin this.)
You can then put all your remaining (server) workloads in either Windows or Linux VMs as you see fit. If you plan on going past one server to start, look at hyperconverged solutions in order to be able to get away from SAN or NAS complexity for such a small deployment. Just take the local disks on you nodes and lash them together into a single storage pool. There's a list of the big players in the article. E-mail me if you need introductions to any of them.
Your biggest single expense should be the Windows license. A single server is cheap, and a two disk IOsafe with enough storage to back up your workloads is cheap too. VMware Essentials is cheap, and you don't need essentials plus with one server in play. Veeam for a single server should be free.
*Poof*. SMB setup for 10 users on a single server with recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives that should be compatible with your typical 10-man shop. If that doesn't seem like it would work for you, please give me more info, and I can suggest alternatives.