One of my colleagues posted an article a while back that I helped peer review. That article made me start thinking how far VDI and the infrastructure technologies around it have come since the inception of "traditional VDI" came to market. Now keep in mind, I am still a huge supporter of the "use RDSH first" method. I believe that most of your business and technological requirements can be facilitated by RDSH. Even if those requirements call for a full desktop interface and not just access to a single or set if application, RDSH is a viable solution for many use cases. All that said, VDI has a very useful place in IT today. And it's the advancement of infrastructure technologies that are helping it progress further than it was a few years ago.
Not too long ago, the difference between persistent and non-persistent virtual desktops could have been a few hundred dollars or more. But times have changed. From the cost analysis that we, put together of both non-persistent and persistent virtual desktops, you can see the gap between the two is readily shrinking.
Numbers like this were not feasible previously without a hodge podge of multiple technologies and even then, it was questionable how valid the claims were. The above numbers were achieved by simply introducing a Microsoft Scale Out File Server to the mix. You can find more detail about this architecture here, but, in short, this design allows for lowering the cost of the infrastructure per user and utilize technologies native to Windows Server and Hyper-V.
We have done some work in the lab with Microsoft Storage Spaces and even lower cost, commodity style storage hardware. Once I have the final data points I will provide those as another example of how VDI costs continue to drop and make it more financially feasible for organizations to deploy.
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