VDI a 'delightful' experience... Really? The VDI talk was the kind of GTC session I love. It’s where a real-world expert talks about how a difficult task is actually accomplished. Not the theory, not how it should work on paper, but what it takes to actually move a project from Point “A” to Point “We’re done with this”. Ken Fingerlos from Lewan Technology delivered …
One thing I did not see is how to deal with a highly diverse user base. What is suitable for our secretarial staff is totally unsuitable for researchers and developers, and what is suitable for a researcher in software engineering is not suitable for somebody doing image processing or CUDA development. There is a tendency towards "one architecture to rule them all" in many IT departments, which would either deliver a complete overkill system for the low end users (leading to cost overruns for which IT is famous), or frustrate the hell out of power users. All to often, the latter is chosen.
There is of course a tension between keeping things simple for the IT staff and at the same time keeping a highly diverse and constantly changing customer base happy.
As a VDI consultant you are 100% right. There are plenty of ways to deal with a range of different users and VMware/Citrix/MS all have ways for handling it. For example, if you are going down the Citrix route you might decide that all of your main admin staff are perfectly fine on Shared Hosted 2008 R2/2012 sessions, whilst giving non-persistent VDI to the users that are a bit heavier but can still have all of their apps virtualised/data elsewhere and then finally persistent desktops for your high end users (designers, techies etc.). There is nothing stopping you from mixing and matching within your environment.
Really you get around "one architecture to rule them all" by planning, planning and more planning. Implementing the infrastructure for VDI is quick and straight forward, where people neglect to spend time is understanding all of their end users and balancing just enough flexibility into the environment so that they can move people to a different usage model without spending too much (and going for a node based approach for the hosts/storage so that the design of the environment can scale linearly). I know it was iterated through the video posted but you really have to plan and design to the absolute eyeballs with anything involving EUC. THEN it will work.
is hp moonshot. Each user gets a quad core cpu, a 128-core GPU, 8GB ram, 32GB SSD, with 180 users(180 servers) in a 4.3U chassis (no hypervisor, no shared storage, so maybe not "VDI" but gives a very similar result likely with a far better user experience). It's a neat approach at least.
HP calls it HP Converged system 100 for hosted desktops.
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