You can already see why the economics of VDI are a tough sell. If the Redmond Mob audits you-and they're aggressive about doing so-you'll end up with a big fat bill for software. Microsoft will not allow you to transfer them or use them simultaneously. And, no, you can't count the licenses you may have purchased with workstations. The VDI software will cost more than that.Īssuming you want to run Windows 7 Pro, you can tack on another $150 per user. That's $160 for the license and $35 per year for the support. It comes in 10 packs, with a list price of $1,950, which includes the first year of support. The simplest way to purchase VDI is Citrix's VDI-in-a-Box product. The first question you might ask is, $150 per desktop for what? We know the systems sitting on the end users' desks aren't part of that number, but certainly all the back-end software and hardware are, right? Probably not. There are a lot of reasons to consider VDI or some other means of hosting apps that typically run on the desktop, but economics alone is not a good enough reason the numbers just don't support it. Second, George says early on that the economics of VDI is a challenge. If you want to see storage bandwidth become the bottleneck, just oversubscribe the server RAM, and-voila-you've got a storage bandwidth problem. The assessment isn't all that surprising coming from a storage expert-when what you sell are hammers, every problem will call mostly for nails.īefore I get into offering my own price analysis, let me say that I agree with a number of points of George's article. More precisely, the bottleneck is storage bandwidth, not capacity. The problem, according to the story, is that storage is the bottleneck. I'd been doing some research on the subject, and was astonished at the $150-per-user price. In recent column, storage expert George Crump postulated that a VDI installation for an organization with 250 users could be done for less than $150 per desktop-not including whatever the user actually uses for hardware connecting to the VDI backend.
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