my company wants to use VDI by 2027
Posted by Cool_Equivalent_4607@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 204 comments
Hi all,
I’m looking for feedback from sysadmins who have real experience with VDI in production.
I work for a large media company , and there’s a plan to migrate a significant number of users to VDI by 2027. We have an internal discussion about this tomorrow, so I’d like to get some honest opinions.
For those running VDI at scale:
- Do you feel it was worth it overall?
- What were the biggest challenges (performance, cost, user experience)?
- Which use cases worked well, and which didn’t?
- If you had to do it again, would you still go with VDI?
Also, more generally:
- Is VDI still growing, or are companies moving away from it toward other solutions?
Context: mix of office users and some heavier media-related workloads.
Appreciate any real-world feedback — especially lessons learned.
Vermino@reddit
VDI's are a nice tech, allowing you lots of control and great management.
A couple of downsides ;
Streaming data was a pain. Think playing youtube, or having a phone/video call. Not sure if this has been resolved already, but they needed lots of extra attention back then.
Your end points. Running 2 endpoints for 1 user is obviously more of a hastle (VDI & their connection device). We went zero clients to reduce that maintance, worked well for classrooms - but hard sell for mobile users. Even for thin clients there were barely any laptop variants.
Feisty_Quarter_1319@reddit
At our company we have used Soliton Secure Workspace - gives a VDI with a secure gateway so no need for VPN. Its focus us on BYOD. We the use Mailzen on our personal mobile devices.
Zealousideal_Run1643@reddit
Had a client recently, they were Finance firm
To answer your question
I would say they are worthy if you are looking to minimize the hardware overhead by using something like a thin client laptops or bring your own device policies
The biggest hurdle is user experience, totally dependent on the latency than anything else, and if they are too high the user won't be happy and starts blaming the support as they can't see the latency, anywhere
We mainly had Devs, ERP users and Office users, basically everyone is a light user, for this use case they were pretty worthy
I would consider for office users and the clients who wants to eliminate the hardware overhead as some clients report their cost center is reporting too much spending for laptops and AIO desktops
Yes, they are very popular among the light office users, ERPs, Developer's (with standalone servers or cloud for their testing environment).
The current shift is mainly with the VMware, ever since they stopped selling the VMware vSphere and started forcing VCF on to customers, they have move to Nutanix solutions and used the Citrix as a streaming services
Many moved to cloud, specifically Azure Virtual Desktop, they are the simple to setup and run at scale in my opinion along with much lower management overhead
If you have some sort automation running, and a small sized team to manage things you are basically having less than few hours managing VMs and patching activities
The minor issue we faced with this Azure approach is the Quota limits, we tend to finish out the quota limits much faster than we can provision a VM to our users
For CAD workloads the cost gets exponential on Cloud so for them I would suggest to use HCI solutions like Azure Arc or Nutanix HCI for cost reasons, the latency is your enemy here, and depending on users setup there are multiple ways to solve them
Ludwig234@reddit
I work at a medium size media company (2000-6000 employees) and we use VDI for at least a portion of our Avid video editing workstations. We currently use omnissa/horizon but there has been discussions about moving to HP anyware. But I guess the HP anyware idea is dead in the water now due to the EOL announcement.
I'm not personally involved with the platform at all so I can't really say if it's a good idea or not, or if the user experience is good. I can really just say that it absolutely can be done.
fonetik@reddit
I’d try something on a small scale with a few vendors but try something easy like Amazon Workplace right away for an easy win. If things work in there, you’ll have a pretty easy standard. If not, you’ll know what to fix before you do that.
Amazon has the resources to help out on all the startup and initial fixes, then you ditch them for a cheaper version after they helped on the hard part.
jaank80@reddit
bank CIO chiming in. We moved off of VDI after being a citrix shop for 15+ years and despite what my service desk manager thought would happen, our administrative burden went down.
islandjake@reddit
I work in an organization with 20 + k users on vdi. We also have departments that have high-speed needs such as graphical or CAD work. 100% of our CAD workstations is not on vdi. 100% of our warehouses is on vdi. It's not wise to throw the entire organization onto vdi. First thing you should do is decide what level of user needs vdi.
And what level of user cannot have vdi.
From that you can make a good financial understanding of whether or not it works for you.
Personally if given a choice everyone would get a thick client. The biggest reason for the laptops over vdi is user perception. We have a set of users who have both and the ones that are using vdi consistently complain more than the ones using VPN and the client even if they take the same path and have the same latency.
So yes there is a use case for it and I firmly 100% believe in that but a proper analysis needs to be taken as to really how much benefit you would get based a number of users an type of users.
For me, I can update the master image on a Citrix environment windows and I can literally patch 22,000 users in one night.
Compliance is easy.
On the downside, one network disruption and people can't even check their email or teams account without a cell phone.
So it really comes down to your tolerance for disruption and the use case.
ZY6K9fw4tJ5fNvKx@reddit
Which problem are you solving?
Hospital setting here, absolutely worth it for us. Many nurses need to switch workstations and open the EHR quickly. Updates are a breeze, new image, reboot the machines and we are live. Something wrong? Rollback.
For a media company who needs accurate colors, video and people don't roam? A hard sell.
Mushroom5940@reddit
MSP supporting big movie studios here. Two of my clients use Azure VMs as their main workstations and it works fairly well. They both have Azure ExpressRoute connected down to their offices and use PCoIP to connect and edit. Working remotely for a day? No problem, just connect from home. Office buildings have TVs and color accurate monitors receiving feeds via NDI from their NLEs (Premiere/Resolve/Avid). VMs power down automatically to save costs and boot up when the user logs in.
echosofverture@reddit
Thanks for writing this. Since a movie studio would deal with large files do you require your users to have Ethernet at home or can they work from wifi. Feel like 1/2 of vdi issues are users wifi issues at home.
Mushroom5940@reddit
All Ethernet. A few get away with WiFi or converters but in the end that’s up to them to choose the delay lag.
BeingSensitive4681@reddit
hospital here too. we have 28 Dell r740s with dual socket xeon and 1 TB mem ea. dedicated nvme of Powerstore 1k. 2000 users VMware 8u3 base.. Citrix VDi. desktops with Windows 11 4vcpu 8gb mem and 30gb disk.
I'm really interested to know what you're running and do you have pressure / slowness?
CernerBurner2000@reddit
You could use kiosk Nursing stations, Imprivata, and Citrix sessions to the EHR to accomplish the same thing, or spend at least 25x's more money to build out a VDI and give everyone a VM.
sharpied79@reddit
Or an engineering shop with lots of CAD workstations, forget VDI...
goingslowfast@reddit
You can either buy everyone expensive workstations with mediocre GPUs that they use occasionally, or you can do VDI with a massive amount of compute power that users share.
I converted a couple 100+ employee engineering firms and a 30 person architecture firm to VDI and across those only had two people that needed dedicated GPU compute.
TCO was a wash, but employees were able to use thinner, lighter laptops with better battery life, and when they did need the GPU compute had a better experience than discrete graphics in a P16 or similar.
RatRaceRunner@reddit
This may be a dumb question, but what kind of screen frame rate and resolution would be typical in a setup like this.
I imagine 4k is out of the question. But can 60Hz be delivered at a tolerable resolution. 1440 at least?
I struggled with a (probably dogshit) Horizon vdi that served as a management layer for a bunch of our IT tasks, and I swear that thing was sputtering at about 10 fps. Occasionally it would completely compress the shit out of the feed to the point where reading was difficult. Not sure what was going on there.
TyberWhite@reddit
It’s not uncommon at all, especially for companies with engineering and drafting spread out across multiple offices and remote locations.
Lachiexyz@reddit
That's not quite true. My previous workplace ran Catia/3DExperience on a VDI farm perfectly fine. The XenServer (don't ask) hosts all had a load of GPUs and they could be shared across the VMs. It allowed for offshore design work to happen, and certainly helped a lot during COVID and working from home etc. It meant users got decent performance, and they had ready access to performant storage at datacentre speeds, so it would arguably perform better than even a dedicated workstation machine.
It's more about making sure you have the right tools for the job. In our case, running CAE software on VDI worked quite well.
sharpied79@reddit
Well aware you can do graphics intensive workloads on VDI, it just gets very expensive, very quickly...
gramsaran@reddit
Yes, it's not cheap. Cisco is quoting us 220k for NVIIDA L40 GPU enabled M8's that we won't get 'til 2007. Up from 80k.
Lachiexyz@reddit
Yeah it's not cheap, but then, neither is a fleet of several hundred workstations.
If you have teams working around the clock across the globe, it's a great way to maximise your investment as when one lot are logging off, the next lot are logging on, so your infrastructure is being utilised for more hours of the day.
My point is, saying forget about it for CAD workloads is a massive generalisation.
itishowitisanditbad@reddit
If you have a rolling workforce it can also have a huge benefit there.
Its basically shared resources without any hassle at that point.
Helps offset some of the price pain points.
Outside-Banana4928@reddit
You have to add more hardware to handle the extra need for graphics, yes.
zeptillian@reddit
Not just hardware but licensing for virtual GPUs.
Per user per year.
kuldan5853@reddit
It's also very much efficient and can be a big boost to productivity, offsetting the costs.
You also have a much easier time in managing and securing that environment and your data.
Unexpected_Cranberry@reddit
Maybe we got a very good deal, but I believe we spent the equivalent of two laptop workstations on GPU hardware that's enough to handle about 50 users.
We have one group now that's happy with the performance, but we're getting complaints from a new group of users that it's not as good as their workstations.
For the first group, the 3D performance is good enough, and considering they're working on and transferring files that are 100+GB in size, not being bottlenecked by a 1Gbit nic on the workstation and being able to work remote outweighs any slight reduction in graphical performance.
Granted, we had two machines ready for GPUs already so we just needed to add that and we were good to go. And then there's the license cost for Nvidia Grid, but it's not that bad as I recall. At least not if you're a larger company. For smaller shops in the past we had Desktops with GPUs that we either put in the server room or at a desk, and then allowed users to connect to them remotely using Citrix.
Sk1tza@reddit
Hate to break it to you but we run high end cad, media, games or whatever you want in VDi and it’s excellent. You need vgpu, non negotiable.
chaoslord@reddit
Our geophysicists run geo-modelling software in a VDI and it's fine. Just need vGPUs and low latency.
Demented_CEO@reddit
We've had a great experience as well! Architect firm, mostly 2D with 3D for white renders. Parsec and Omnissa Horizon and tons of raw performance.
McDili@reddit
Not true sir.
We are a Creo shop and we leveraged VDI using AWS Workspaces and their GPU AMI works great for this.
In regard to OP, we went VDI for security, we have a significant number of externals/contractors and following a milestone for us to require enrolled device certs to authenticate to VPN we also deployed VDI to ensure the externals without managed endpoints had a solution to continue providing services.
If you’re familiar with AWS it’s pretty straightforward and scalable.
andyr354@reddit
The same here. Used Horizon with Imprivata for years in a healthcare setting. Nurses and docs logged in once at the start of their shift and their workstation followed them everywhere.
Affectionate-Cat-975@reddit
THIS! First line says it all. What are you Solving? Many Execs get a bug in their brain and then drone on about a 'Solution' forever without defining the Need to be Solved
Burgerb@reddit
But in media you have to handle large files that each client needs to download to their local machine. If you work with contractors or 3rd party vendors, providing them with access to the data is risky. With VDI all the movie filed and what not stay centralized. There are specialized tools and protocols that handle the interaction between the end user and the virtual environment so that mouse movement such as scrubbing on a timeline feel like you do then on you local machine.
caffeine-junkie@reddit
Not quite for M&E. VDI is pretty common as you can then leverage your workstations with teams in EU/SEA/India/N.America. So they get pretty much constant use rather than just sitting idle for large chunks of the day.
hawk010374@reddit
Noticed Workspot have partnered with Akamai for their Cloud PC. Seems cost effective. Has GPU support.
MekanicalPirate@reddit
We are 5 years into our VDI journey and have gone through lots of bumps and bruises that has whittled our management's justification for keeping it around down to it's security benefits. I still feel like it's worth it because it's a future-positioning thing instead of a current-day thing...as long as management keeps their justification(s). I'm here to ensure the platform runs as smoothly as possible while riding that wave.
CernerBurner2000@reddit
Terrible idea with AI data centers driving hardware cost of. Desktop OS's still require cpu and ram, you are just going to be running them on server class resources now.
You you will still have to support some kind of physical device to connect to the vdi, and if you are 100% vdi you will be having to create multiple images and manage them all to make everybody happy .
It will be more expensive, require more support, but will be more secure so if that's what you're looking for your goals can be accomplished.
Jacmac_@reddit
Its really a good idea, although it might require handing everyone a computer in addition to using a vdi. I used one at my company for over 5 years before I retired, it worked out great for me, but the vdi was not shared, it was dedicated vdi with plenty of cpu cores and RAM. If they go with cheezy shared vdi, low ram and 2 cores, the users will hate it.
psu1989@reddit
Our private cloud (top 100 in the world) has 20000+ VMs and at that scale it was worth it. Started over 8 years ago before the Broadcom ransom. We faired pretty well, not sure how smaller shops could make it work financially today. I feel like VDI and container technology will only continue to grow but AWS, etc are going to be a better value than in house.
Some day everything will be a SaaS app and we’ll only need a dumb thin client to run a browser.
spiderz-a-plenty@reddit
I work for a large university. As part of an efficiency study about a decade ago, we were told to move everyone to VDI. Guess how many people are using VDI now? Almost none. It was a massive failed experiment for us, but it ended up being more expensive and more volatile. Like others said, it depends on your usage and the problem your company is trying to solve.
marvinxtech@reddit
Here's some real advice:
If someone says something like this in tomorrow's meeting:
"Full VDI adoption by 2027 is where the industry is heading."
I'd honestly push back with a simple question:
"What problem are we actually trying to solve here?
Security? Easier management? Remote work? Or just cutting costs?
Those are totally different goals, and they usually lead to very different solutions.
VDI is genuinely great for centralized management, security, compliance, and data control.
But when companies try to use it as a full replacement for high-performance local workstations for everyone, especially for heavier workloads, many end up scaling back later.
shepdog_220@reddit
Massive pain in the ass to maintain. Probably 60% of our tickets are fixing minor vdi issues, multi billion dollar company moving away from vdi
planedrop@reddit
A lot of places are moving off VDI and for good reason, I would not recommend it. It's a pain to maintain, can be really slow, etc... And IMHO there are better solutions for most of the things VDI helps solve.
unccvince@reddit
Forget VDI in the media industry for workstations doing media stuff., you will suffer!! Accounting, Management and Sales are OK for VDI but WTF, another system to take for you to care of?
lotekjunky@reddit
not sure if you use any voip, but e911 on VDI SUCKS
virgil777@reddit
My last employer had stand up a VDI environment that ran our on premise Esri GIS environment. It was a massive ongoing maintenance process I would not recommend anyone enduring, or paying for in our modern cloud environment.
Some examples of issues we had:
My honest opinion; utilize whatever cloud infrastructure you can to prove to your employer that financially, and compute wise building out a VDI environment is not worth it. Good luck!
Soylent_gray@reddit
VDI are a great alternative to VPN. We've finally been able to eliminate all VPN use by giving users VDI options
doktormane@reddit
Are your users using personal laptops?
Soylent_gray@reddit
It's a mix. Those that require after hours access get a laptop, but all users can access a VDI from a personal desktop
_SleezyPMartini_@reddit
Hi,
I had a client who ran VDI for years for about 40 users, and the costs and effort to maintain this became too high especially with all the Vmware/Broadcom nonsense. Even with the best nvidia grid cards, massive ram, the performance was "ok" but still not as good as a direct machine. This was a client in engineering, and use of Autocad products was heavy.
So I would say, it depends on your use case.
bnlf@reddit
Azure Virtual Desktop solves this problem. It’s one of the best solutions Microsoft has always created. Extremely flexible and cost effective. I’ve had clients going from several $100ks of dollars on Citrix to spending $30k/year.
Alternatively, M365 options are also good. Simpler to implement and manage but more expensive.
FerengiKnuckles@reddit
My company runs a very hefty VDI cluster for our architecture/engineering team. We have generally achieved performance parity with physical workstations (except for real time rendering tasks) but the cost is very high. For us, it is worth it, but most companies would have abandoned it long ago.
It is certainly possible, but you have to have a strong use case and deep pockets.
woodsae14@reddit
I do infrastructure for a large org, and a few smaller orgs, one was a graphics house, depending on your requirements moving to VDI based workstations can save money, in the long term, but will require significant short term investment and time to get right. It can be cheaper if you already have in house staff who can deploy this for you, but my suggestion would be first to see what you need, if your primary on Windows or Linux, this is much easier than say MacOS.
A lot of your questions are heavily biased by the unique environment that is being converted, but overall:
yes VDI is still growing in the industry
for the environments we implemented in, yes it was worth it.
one of the best use cases for VDI is mobility, you can design a space to allow users to come and go at anytime, sit down and any terminal and access their resources from cheap and more easily replaced (lifecycle/theft/damage) hardware than traditionally was used. We use thin client and thin books for this at one site.
I don’t think I’m the only one who will say that one of your biggest challenges will be your end users, people don’t like change, and they don’t like to have to modify the way they work or get to things.. so there’s your first challenge.
Your second challenge is I’ll be not just migrating from say a full tower to a thin client, if that’s your path of choice, but it will be how to easily broker that connection while also providing the security needed for a workforce that may not work on-prem all the time. A big part of the recurring costs these days are paying for licensing of brokers like Omnissa Horizon etc.
Just a few quick thoughts of mine, Hope this helps with your decision!
Sp00nD00d@reddit
You left out the key and most important fact.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Cool_Equivalent_4607@reddit (OP)
They didn't tell us yet. But my guess is cost and centralisation. We are just in the research part now
Asleep_Spray274@reddit
VDI is not cost saving. you still need endpoints to connect to the VDI.
thepitredish@reddit
Yeah, and those little things can get pricey, quick!
goingslowfast@reddit
RIP Stratodesk.
universepower@reddit
In me experience, you’re pretty much always doubling your cost - you have to manage two separate stacks - your thin clients (which are usually not so thin) and your VDI, then you have the licensing cost of the VDI platform, your virtualisation platform, and then you have to buy both the kit to run it and the physical machines to access it. If you go cloud, you still have these costs, they’re just hidden behind a shiny monthly sub or IaaS cost.
thortgot@reddit
Picking a technology without a problem statement is silly.
Go get the problem statement and hen formulate a plan.
gramsaran@reddit
C-Level improving the business with marketecture.
simpleglitch@reddit
In a previous job, I did profressional installs and consulting for VDI (Horizon).
I have never seen one of these projects save money (properly sized VDI compared to properly speed laptops).
I've seen many good use cases for VDI. The hopstial example someone mentioned is great.
I've set them up for a technical college with app provisioing so they can basically drop a user into a group for a course and next login they'll have all the apps they need.
I've done a FIPS environment for out of state developers so they could work on sensitive data without it leaving the on-prem environment.
I've set them up for bank teller stations.
Having done all that, I'd personally rather manage normal laptops with SCCM/Intune unless I've got a specific security need, but maybe that's just because I got sick of the technology haha.
BreathDeeply101@reddit
Management has given you a solution in search of a problem.
There may be many legitimate problems, but if they don't inform you of the problems that they see they risk you not solving the ones they want you to solve.
It may be that the problem is "just do what we ask" or "we have FOMO and heard a podcast about it on the morning run" but you should at least try and figure out why they have made this decision to meet their desires.
DerpyNirvash@reddit
That is a feature of VDI, higher cost and more centralisation, but is there a real reason to use VDI other than that?
RegularMixture@reddit
Based on what you have said, my guess is security and control. VDI is not cheaper, but it allows for more control and deployment.
ltobo123@reddit
Oh nooooooooooooooo that ain't a good start
clybstr02@reddit
Cost for VDI is almost always higher than just workstations.
gruntbuggly@reddit
It will definitely help with centralisation. Over time it probably won't help all that much with costs, it will just move the bucket that's paying for the cost from capex to opex. So companies see the capex decreases and thing "we're doing a good job of managing costs", and they see the opex increases and thing "that's a sign that the business is doing well".
We could actually save money on VDI by buying everyone in our company top of the line Macbook Pros every 3 years.
We accept the additional cost of VDI for the benefits of simplified management, better data controls, stronger conditional access policies, and we can have really lightweight terminals on office desks that only need to drive 2 monitors, and we have been able to greatly simplify our BYOD policies, but not allowing people to do any actually work from their BYO device other than allowing them to connect to VDI with the VDI client.
Sp00nD00d@reddit
You can't even begin the research part without that question answered. It will guide basically every aspect of the research.
LeadershipSweet8883@reddit
Yes, in a hospital setting. Follow me desktops and endpoints without patient data were worth the difficulty and cost. Right after it all went live, COVID hit and we flipped a switch and everyone could work from home with the same desktop experience.
Tuning the OS images for VDI, all the work that went into tuning and validating each one of the hundreds of applications for VDI. Standardizing on one image (or a handful) is really difficult. Many applications will need to be rearchitected to make sense in your VDI environment. We used a host of approaches - web based clients vs ThinApp vs RemoteApp vs deploying at login vs baking into the image. Each one has positives and negatives.
It all generally worked well after the whole application catalog process. If you can make your workstation imaging process pretty similar to what you get with VDI, you can move the troublemakers back to physical if you need to.
I will say the overall infrastructure that connects users to desktops was more fragile and prone to downtime than I would have expected from VMware. That may have been an issue with the implementation team rather than the technology.
What didn't work well was the huge bill we got from Microsoft because we no longer were running off of OEM licenses that came with the workstations.
After the gutting of VMware by Broadcom, hacking off the VDI product and selling it to Omnissa? I'd be hesitant. I would do research into the roadmap for Omnissa and they future of their VMware licensing and experiences from current customers. Not that I've heard anything bad, but I've never worked with them. It could be better support even.
If I had to do it again, I'd probably use something fixed cost (i.e. not cloud) and simpler. I'd avoid Citrix, it always is miserable. There's a Nutanix VDI solution out there. Also... see if you can run your desktop applications on the server version of Windows because then you can buy datacenter licenses to cover the hardware cluster and not pay per VM.
The cloud solutions seem to always work out poorly because the business is never willing to pay enough money to have decent performance.
spyingwind@reddit
Some questions to answer:
Are they are just doing box art for packaging?
Maybe they still need a color grading machine on site?
Are they editing videos? How much data do they need access to for their active projects? How fast of a network access do they need to not feel slowed down?
What amount of latency is acceptable? 500ms? 100ms? 40ms? 10ms?
Inn0centSinner@reddit
I implemented VMware Horizon many years ago. I'm pretty sure it was because I wasn't given enough money to throw at host servers to host them for a Call Center of 25 agents running only Gigabit switches because it was slow and I always received complaints. Somebody also has the manage, support, and fix it if something goes wrong and I was that guy. Nobody else on my team knew anything about managing the host servers and the VDI portal that supported it. You also have to spend money to get your users thin clients. Years later, I just got everyone decently spec'd Dell Optiplex 3080s. I got to repurpose my host servers for other things and Call Center hardly ever complains.
Sk1tza@reddit
VDi is absolutely doable for your users, it’s just config and cost. We run very high end servers, very high end gpu’s as well so if you think you’ll save money that way, you probably won’t. Our environment is all CAD, Creative Cloud with everything/ anything else in between and it’s done via Horizon and we support it all over our multiple regions. It works for every user and we have no workstations except some laptops. Highly recommend.
thewildfowl@reddit
Sucks
ZookeepergameSad7665@reddit
Call the experts. VDI deployments will usually fall flat in their face for various reasons if you don’t have experience. I personally have moved dozens of customers to VDI (Citrix, VMware, Azure Virtual Desktops) from physical endpoints. DM me for more info.
eakthekat2@reddit
I have mostly been in the end user support realm and have used VDI in several situations. For the call center, it made a lot of sense. Cut down on costs for end user hardware, centralized and simplified administration, and improved security. At a physician network, we used it for remote access and nurses stations. At my current job it is used for BYOD, for contractors mostly.
My advice is to be sure the environment is properly configured and implemented and users are trained. For example; the physician network was set up with Citrix as a proof of concept. They liked it and said to deploy as-is so no more money is spent. The problem was that there were too many users for the severs and it kept bogging down and crashing. In other environments, we had issues with people closing without logging out then not being able to log into another station. In places, where everything was properly implemented and users trained there were few issues.
The best setups are usually mixed. Artists and multimedia people will probably do best with workstations. Accountants and call center people would be fine with VDI. It also works well for temp workers and contractors that you dont need ot issue comptuers to.
mrbiggbrain@reddit
I have managed VDI in some capacity for all of my career. Everything from HP Thin clients accessing Terminal servers, VMWare Horizons, Azure Virtual Desktops, and AWS Workspaces. I have had use cases where it knocked every goal out of the park and use cases where it was the worst fit possible.
The best use cases I have found are ones where performance requirements where low. For example I had a company who did warehousing and employees needed access to a green screen AS400 application and rarely some very simple documents. We could cram about 50 users onto a moderately sized terminal server and ran about 10 of them.
But the executives at the same company insisted on using the same technology. Even with a dedicated pool of servers their giant spreadsheets and demanding use cases crippled the systems and provided a terrible experience. We provided some of them dedicated windows VMs but the lack of real dedicated hardware such as a GPU meant access to acceleration was off the table. We could have fixed this but it would be costly for the size and more complex then issuing dedicated PCs.
Another good use case has been localization and data governance. We have lots of developers out of India, but information governance requirements. Providing secure and performant access to databases and other protected information through AWS Workspaces has put developer machines closer to the data sources while complying with legal requirements.
This can be important for applications with network sensitivity where you would rather take the hit to latency between the computer and the user then between the computer and it's resources. Lots of older accounting software and applications make direct SQL queries and can suffer without direct access.
It is really important to have a good solid use case beyond "We thought we should do this thing". Everything is a tradeoff and many people ignore some of the very big impacts that VDI can have on productivity when done poorly.
Away_Chair1588@reddit
This is my experience as well over the past 10+ years.
You have shared workspaces where people are hopping on for 15 minutes, checking a few e-mails, logging into their web apps, and printing off documents from Word/Excel? It's great for that.
If this is someone's daily driver all day every day with a laundry list of applications (some heavier than others) .... they end up frustrated and hating it, leading to less buy in overall.
Like others have said, it comes down to the problem you're trying to solve. What does the user fleet look like? Are there a lot of caveats and outliers, or is it uniformed and basic?
No matter the scenario, this is NOT a cost saving operation. Also, while there may be less support calls overall because it's more controlled, 99% of the support calls that come in will go to the engineer team, not service desk. Most of the troubleshooting is too complex for service desk level.
Crotean@reddit
How many VDI image types are you going to have maintain is a consideration too. Keeping up with scripting for a lots of different applications, updates and configurations for desktop systems is a not insignificant amount of overhead in a complex environment. That could be a time saver or it could end up taking longer than just basic imaging depending on your needs.
trueg50@reddit
Why? What is the requirement and problem this will address?
Cool_Equivalent_4607@reddit (OP)
We will migrate to linux so they want to also benefit from the lower cost in VDI and centralisation. That's what I think. They didn't tell us the reasons.
Soggy-Attempt@reddit
You’re going to Linux as your desktop?
If so, what software are you going to run?
I’m not seeing this ending well.
seanpmassey@reddit
Lower costs and VDI don’t belong in the same sentence. You don’t do VDI to save money, and VDI was never a cost-saving project.
Angelworks42@reddit
For us I don't think we saved any money, but all the vdi hosts in our cluster are ex data center operations machines - so 5-7 years old. They were machines we were going to buy anyhow on the normal replacement cycle for supported hardware. So we essentially got the solution for nearly nothing - again outside of labor - as these were machines that were going to be surplused/sold off.
That said the environment has been pretty useful for byod users, external contractors etc - but I wouldn't say we put our entire desktop strategy behind it.
Pristine_Internet765@reddit
It's not enough to switch to linux to save money ? Going for VDIs may not be necessarily a saving. And being a media company isn't local responsiveness and file sizes matter along with specs or y'all use paint?
khobbits@reddit
Visual FX Sysadmin here:
We've been Linux all along, we just buy a big SAN, and run all projects for there. Better for collaboration as well, when you've got 500 artists working on a movie.
Rustee12@reddit
VDI will not be cheaper.
Moving towards Linux will probably also introduce licensing requirements for VDA rights if you are not using M365 licensing for the users. Assuming you'll be using Windows VMs.
You also need to factor in on-premises vs DaaS options, do you require HA, DR, backups, etc.? All these increase your costs.
I went through an exercise costing last year AWS and Azure DaaS options, for \~200 VMs, we were approaching $400k to $500k a year. It was not financially feasible to move from our on-premises Horizon setup to a cloud provider without additional investments, I had no real business case to support the move.
luger718@reddit
Were you using AVD and doing personal pools? Cause that sounds like it would add up.
Windows 365 seems like a better solution for that, fixed cost at least.
We do pooled hosts and per user cost is $25-$50 a month depending on the pool size. At least, that's what Nerdio is showing me.
Personally, with everything moving to SaaS we try to avoid offering AVD to clients.
Rustee12@reddit
Sadly majority of our VDI uses today are all personal 1 to 1 use; which completely blows the budget.
We have little transactional workers on the solution that could benefit from a pool setup.
Palantir_Scraper@reddit
VDI is not cheap lol. It's incredibly versatile and accessible, but it is not cheap.
Royal_Log_1067@reddit
VDI and Low cost don't go together, who ever sells you VDI make sure to get 15-20% more resources.
ZY6K9fw4tJ5fNvKx@reddit
Just netboot those machines, no vdi required. A solution comes after a problem, not before. If you want to save money, don't use vdi.
sderby@reddit
zero_z77@reddit
I know this isn't super helpful, but i just find it hilarious that we've basically come full circle back to dummy terminals & mainframes.
But, for real, anyone saying it's "cheaper" is peddling the same lie that was behind "the cloud". Hardware is hardware, and hardware costs money, it doesn't matter if it lives on your desk, in the basement, or somewhere in a datacenter 1,000 miles away, the difference in cost is going to be marginal at best.
VDI just means your desktop lives on a server you can access from anywhere. If you have users who work remotely, frequently jump between a laptop and desktop, need to remote in from a phone, are particularly abusive to their laptops, you have security concerns, or you just hate migrating user profiles all the time, then VDI makes sense. Otherwise you're just playing the hardware shell game.
TuckerBuck@reddit
Overall, yes it was worth it but some ppl may disagree depending on the cost. Biggest challenge is trying to convince other teams to use it. If your upper management has your back and green lighting, then should be easier to implement. PAWs are a good use case. Non-persistent farms are a hit or miss. If you are using something like app volumes, that can be a pain for some apps. Same with mass deploying some apps in golden images. Most popular apps are pretty easy but there are some specialized apps that can be a pain with their licensing. Yes, I would do it again. It's a pretty fun system to implement and manage.
0brex@reddit
I work in a company with VDI and absolutely hate it. Latency is the biggest problem, that small delay can drive some people crazy. Also - VDI my company uses has too low spec which is making work even more difficult. I'm going to look for other job where VDI is not a thing.
0brex@reddit
I work in a company with VDI and absolutely hate it. Latency is the biggest problem, that small delay can drive some people crazy. Also - VDI my company uses has too low spec which is making work even more difficult. I'm going to look for other job where VDI is not a thing.
0brex@reddit
I work in a company with VDI and absolutely hate it. Latency is the biggest problem, that small delay can drive some people crazy. Also - VDI my company uses has too low spec which is making work even more difficult. I'm going to look for other job where VDI is not a thing.
TheGraycat@reddit
VDI is totally a viable option….. depending on the problem you are looking to solve.
Also they’re always a total PITA when it comes to video calling.
seanner_vt2@reddit
Construction company. We use it at the home office but none of the sattelite offices have it. It was more for security on the billing/payroll (the old CFO was paranoid of anything online) and because we can lose power if the wind blows just right.
EdmondVDantes@reddit
It's worth only strong enforcement of security policies. Apart from that I don't know, I had to use in one engineering project and the vdi was locked and I had to open ports for every tool I need meh times but in banking or other sectors I feel it's a must
Ok_Rip_5338@reddit
i had a hellish time with it but this was 10 years ago with vmware. Performance issues and lag. Issues with virtual machines not being available/booted when the user goes to sign in. stuff like that. but again, this was a long time ago.
If I was doing VDI now, I'd do hosted Win 365 with Intune. Just go all in on microsoft. from what ive read it works well.
FaithlessnessOk5240@reddit
We used Citrix XenDesktop with Dell Wyse Thinclient units from 2013-2020.
Overall, they didn’t really save money, and once Covid hit, we returned to physical laptops with virtualized apps.
For VDI, as others have mentioned, users dealing with editing large files have to have a pretty optimized setup. Give them a cookie cutter one-to-many VM, and there will be nothing but problems.
Roaming profiles also became a headache if you don’t set them up correctly.
Is this company primarily in-office, hybrid or remote?
redstarduggan@reddit
Depending on exact use case it's either brilliant and life changing or a complete fucking nightmare.
Media company? Would POC the shit out of it.
Abompje@reddit
VDI for a media company does not make a lot of sense.
VDI is expensive. Graphics, specially video, is far from optimal in VDI, eventho there are (expensive) methods to improve it.
I used to be a workplace architect for hospitals. VDI has its advantages for specific workflows. It is useful when your users have to move around a lot and have their session roam with them but they do not want to carry a device with them all day long.
Even the hospitals I know are considering downsizing their VDI-environments because of the costs.
ConsistentCoat5608@reddit
VDI feels hard for our IT team who is used to dealing with personal desktops, but once they get the deployments down and the monthly maintenance and downtime turns to zero hours, then they will be happy. Customers will be happy with always having a system available, and tech will enjoy a consistent environment to troubleshoot issues.
My company offers services which can help in the LA area, we have partners who have successfully deployed many on premise, cloud and hybrid VDI solutions.
Nydus87@reddit
Totally worth it for us. Work with a company that does health insurance related work and with several thousand employees, just the onboarding effort saved is amazing. No sending out a company-imaged laptop/desktop. Just give people a stipend for a cheap computer, send them some monitors, mouse, keyboard, and a headset, and they're good to go. As long as they're just doing email, office, Teams, and some basic admin work, you can damn near run it from a cell phone (and I do, frequently). We even use admin VDIs internally for things like network admins so once I've opened my "regular user" VDI, I then use a different account to open up my admin VDI. Not having a laptop to worry about is really, really nice. When I want to save on space at my house, I can just use my PC that has my monitors, mouse, and keyboard that I really like.
FloiDW@reddit
Been a consultant for Remote Workplaces for 15 years now. Trends come and go but VDI / Remote Desktops of any kind always stayed around. There are lots of use cases in terms of data security and protection, separation of administrative workload, equipment for externals that can be easily achieved with VDI solutions.
All depends on the idea and the solution design.
I just rolled out a 8k User VDI based on azure. Still growing.
bradsfoot90@reddit
I read many posts and none of them mentioned peripheral support.
Our VDI rollout has been completed roadblocked by users who need to scan files and save them to a fileshare.
indvs3@reddit
VDI doesn't lower costs, it raises them. The only way it makes sense from a financial perspective is if the introduction of VDI makes the core business processes more streamlined to an extent that "time saved" more than compensates for the extra costs of the VDI infrastructure.
VDI doesn't replace existing services, it adds an extra step and thereby a layer of complexity that more often than not isn't accounted for wrt cost and time spent for the required maintenance.
I urge you (and/or your colleagues) to be more than thorough in the cost-to-benefit analysis of what your employer wants to achieve. I read that you've not been informed of why there would be a need for VDI and that, to me at least, is quite concerning. It feels like people with too tight neck ties were sold a bunch of industry buzz words and the lack of air to their brain caused them to be enthusiastic about it.
CevJuan238@reddit
Unless they plan on hiring an actual vdi desktop engineer, they’ll expect normal IT admins to “figure it out”. Also, without change advisory boards and department participation, this is highly unlikely to work out well for any company.
LowMight3045@reddit
I dont recommend VDI unless going 100 % to VDI.
Our environment is a mix of laptops and VDI. 80 % laptops.
I dont see us moving to 100 % VDI any time soon, we've been using VDI for about 6 years now.
VDI can work but for our environment I dont see a cost benefit. We have to keep infrastructure for both laptops and VDI , and different tech support teams, and manageres.
I dont see how that can possibly be cost effective. Additionally we have warm standby physical infrastructure in separate datacenters for both.
BoltActionRifleman@reddit
When there are problems in our VDI environment, it’s usually widespread and hard to diagnose, troubleshoot and resolve. We’re slowly moving away from it and going back to desktops and laptops, which rarely have issues, and if they do it’s usually isolated to one PC. It also used to save a lot of money being on VDI, but I’m not seeing that so much anymore, if at all.
vNerdNeck@reddit
Been down this road many times.
The net-net is that it can be worth it, but use counts matter.
Anything below \~300 users would be worth it from experience POV, but not a costs. 300 users is the inflection point where it becomes cost effective vs buying desktops / etc.
Just a side note - VDI environments are WAY more performance and need more performance than what most people believe. You can not take and stick VDIs on spinning media storage arrays and expect a good performance. You've got to be all flash, and with windows 11 you also can not be stingy with the resources (a lot of win11 deployments find they need GPUs for a great experience.. just something to keep in mind).
--
For M&E - VDI can help in a lot of ways depending on what area of the business you are working with. The GPU and power needs alone for some of those workstations are better suited in the data center.. you can also get more dense with editors by going this route.
--
TLDR - Yes it can be worth it. But it comes at a price. If the business isn't willing to invest \~500k+ ish ( >300 users , more if you need GPUs) .. then it's not going to be worth the exercise.
DesignerGoose5903@reddit
Just no. It will be worse and cost more, not the proper use-case for a VDI environment at all I'm afraid.
OregonTechHead@reddit
You cannot possibly make an educated decision like that based on the very little information OP gave us.
Being a "large media company", it's quite possible VDI makes a ton of sense and would be more stable, more flexible, and less expensive.
Need much much more information to be able to give any sort of recommendation at all though.
DesignerGoose5903@reddit
They stated "heavier media-related workflows". I work in a similar industry so I can with certainty say that VDI is not appropriate for this kind of workflow and will definitely not save money in the long run.
Miwwies@reddit
Made sense for us because we have satellite offices in almost every city (10-20 users in each) and in different provinces. Users are mobile and may work in different offices during the week. It’s easy to patch / update but you need a solid app packaging team. We use non persistent so we had to do quite a bit of customization.
It’s very network sensitive so you need to optimize everything. It works with Teams (optimization) but I wouldn’t say it’s ideal. But for your everyday normal user (office, internet, in house apps) it’s ideal. For users that are in meeting all days, like managers, we issue a laptop instead.
For us it’s cheaper than having a laptop for every user. We use thin clients (dell wyse) with their management console.
Power users (devs, steaming, managers) all have laptops. Regular users are on AVD.
PMURITSPEND@reddit
This year is not the year I'd go shopping for a fat server cluster with a bunch on GPU's.
Carnival_killian@reddit
Make sure you have a very robust and resilient infrastructure. All your eggs are in one basket. One small issue on the backend and everyone is screaming at you.
PositiveBubbles@reddit
Either that or the environment isn't thought out properly. Especially large/complex organisations where you can't have a one size fits all model.
All we can do is document/ recommend/ advise any concerns to those that make decisions and of they ignore you then you've tried tried.
che-che-chester@reddit
Like others have said, it depends what problem you’re trying to solve.
If it is purely money, I doubt VDI will be any cheaper.
If it is security, VDI will be better if configured properly.
If it is performance because you have remote users working with large files stored on-premises, VDI could be a good solution, but high performance VDIs will really drive the price up.
We’ve been moving to mostly SaaS apps and are thinking about going to a secure browser like Island and ditching both Citrix and VDIs.
HappyCricket8159@reddit
W365 for us after moving away from Citrix and used only for third party/contract resource. Work well, but end users often have issues joining teams calls with reliable audio/video from their own corporate machines. So we have to then remember to send meeting invites to both their 3rd party email address as well as the email address on our own network.
pakman82@reddit
Define 'large media company'.. (or not, i'm sure theres NDA's ..) but i've worked for some of the biggest, truly global, mega-corps & their able to achieve VDI's for all kinds of solutions.. the current one has/ had 90% or more of their org on VDI via A company provided device.. so double the outlay. not that I manage that side of the house. Not that i budgeted, or engineered it. But the evidence is out there, that it can be done at scale, if the company is truly interested. ANd im talking 100K + users for the top 2 organizations.
Jahamas6701@reddit
As others have stated, make sure you are addressing why you need VDI in the first place. What problem are you solving?
Centralization and security were huge benefits for us. As well as end point management (We were planning on moving from laptops to thin desktops).
The up front cost to move to VDI will be significant. After doing many cost analyses on VDI it always came out to a wash or slightly more expensive.
VDI really excels when you have a bunch of users doing the exact same job and all require the exact same resources and apps. It gets more complicated when you have a mix of users that have slightly different requirements.
I don't know what VDI platform you are going with but we are using Omnissa Horizon. I would suggest reading about instant clones vs persistent machines to see which best fit your environment. If you are going to need to roll out a bunch of individual persistent machines you might as well go with a thickclient and manage them through Intune or something.
Also if you do end up going with VDI I would highly recommend you test out multiple thinclient OS's to see which one fits your environment the best. We initially started with IGEL and moved to 10ZIG. 10ZIG's management was much simpler but not as granular, it also didn't seem to be as compatible with as many thinclients as IGEL.
If your users are heavy video and/or audio users they might have performance issues unless you provide dedicated resources such as GPUs. We currently have a call center using VDI desktops with very little to no issues while using softphones throughout the day.
PositiveBubbles@reddit
We use Horizon to. It was great with our old environment my colleague and I supported and our infrastructure manager setup when he was a SysAdmin/Engineer.
We hired a new guy who doesn't understand every area isn't a one size fits all and ignores our security concerns. I was told my VDI was unsupported because I made it compliant by enrolling it into intune and defender. 🤷♀️
I also have no idea what they did with fslogix but when I was on a volatile desktop, it was nothing but headaches and people would wait an average of a week to get their profiles reset because we're not allowed to reset our own own and I was given a persistent one because I'm unfortunately still getting asked by the wider areas to help them even though I moved roles.
It's a shame because it can be really great when maintained properly.
Frothyleet@reddit
VDI for general stuff is simply more expensive and more work to manage than thick clients.
However, it's an excellent solution for a set of very specific use cases, usually ones that benefit from having all of your data in one central location, or where users will be roaming from client to client frequently (e.g. healthcare or manufacturing).
Also sometimes for shitty LOB or accounting apps that are basically incapable of operating over a network instead of local to the database (fuckin' sage).
baldiesrt@reddit
Vdi and media don’t mix well unless you pack your servers with expensive video cards and ram. Your servers will cost more than $50k each and that was 8 years ago when we went to it. We are back on workstations now.
Arudinne@reddit
We have a little over 100 users using Windows 365.
The main issue is latency as the users themselves are several thousand miles from where the VMs are hosted I can't do anything about that due to various regulations.
W365 is easy-mode for VDI's if your an M365 shop.
Public_Warthog3098@reddit
Vdi is not a good solution for everything
krattalak@reddit
I've done VDI in the medical arena, predominately in a call center type environment, that was some time ago.
Recently I just deployed Azure VDI as a test environment as we have a scope of users deployed internationally that don't have machines we can readily control, so we're looking at Azure to allow them access to a controlled environment and we don't have to care about their endpoints. Once you go through the pain of setting Azure up, the VDI solution is all accessed via 'Windows App' at https://windows.cloud.microsoft/#/devices which is basically a cloud version of RDP.
cyberworm_@reddit
Shoot me a message. I’d be happy to discuss my experience in this area. 😎
WorkLurkerThrowaway@reddit
We have 95% of our employees on VDI. There’s pros and cons. For us the biggest pro is security. We’ve got micro segmentation between every desktop. If one gets compromised there are very few outlets to another device. A reboot is basically a new machine minus the user folders.
Cons: server costs are insane. Issues are a bit harder to troubleshoot, it’s kind of a mindset shift for most people including newer Helpdesk employees. Audio/video takes some extra work to setup. You definitely want to offload Zoom/Teams traffic to the thin client or everyone is going to hate it.
CBOW_IT@reddit
Are you guys running on prem or in the cloud?
WorkLurkerThrowaway@reddit
On prem.
natflingdull@reddit
This was my experience as well. VDI helps tremendously with easy scalability, plus its extremely easy to keep machines up to date and compliant. Also, SSL vpn into VDI from byod is a nice bit of flexibility that can help in a lot of use cases.
Cost though, it basically never ends up being cheaper, and end user performance can often have an impact. Any sales people trying to sell you on lowered costs or better performance are simply lying.
I’ve implemented horizon for US banks that had low tolerance for endless vulnerability hunting and needed a lot of flexibility for scaling up and down desktop resources for short term staffing and it was great.
WorkLurkerThrowaway@reddit
Ya I’m in the financial industry, it’s one of the reasons VDI makes sense for us.
Ok_Salt_9925@reddit
1500+ seat VDI admin here. For office work, it's fine. For heavy duty stuff like CAD/Photoshop/Illustrator, size accordingly or be prepared to pay the price. We didn't size correctly and now face the conaequences. We need to buy more hardware, out of budget, with these AI inflated prices. Ouch.
simon-g@reddit
Did some work for a bank that was doing this just before covid. Was mostly to enable an easier move to a new (hotdesking) office space but given the lockdowns they were pretty happy to just send people off home to work from there.
It doesn’t save money if you want any performance. Their hardware and licensing bill to run all this was insane even back when memory was comparatively cheap. If you’re running audio/video/calling through it then you need all sorts of plugins and good client machines to offload to. A bigger proportion than they expected needed persistent VMs so ended up managing those like any other endpoint. And it’s definitely not a one-off project, you need VDI skills around for all the patching, testing and day-to-day ops.
It really needs to be solving a problem that is well handled by VDI - even then an approach of selectively using VDI (eg for contractors you don’t want to give a laptop to) may make more sense.
jackwmc4@reddit
it really depends on what the objectives are. could be the way to go or could be a really expensive headache
Chadarius@reddit
It works well in very niche homogenous job specific settings. If your environment is complex and varied, VDI is usually not a good idea.
Would I use it for heavy media related workloads. Heck no. If the office workers all have the same exact set of software and use cases, then it might work for them.
No matter what, it is generally more expensive than giving everyone a desktop or laptop.
PerfSynthetic@reddit
I've used VDI since 2012 with a mix of Citrix and VMware to xendesktop etc.
With today's apps in the cloud (office 365, Google office, zoom/WebEx/teams..). VDI is only 'better' if every user has a low latency internet connection and a decent PC to connect to the VDI.
Think of it in simple terms, VDI is sending video to a user with keyboard and mouse input/feedback all based on latency between the server and user.
If everyone uses web apps or can access all of their work using Office365, Google etc, then do not go VDI. It will be too expensive to host a browser on a server..
If users require heavy video or GPU resources, CAD, design, drawing, or latency sensitive, VDI is possible but it will be insane hard for your users to adapt to the new latency delay and it will be very expensive.
If the company wants to save money on end user desktops or laptops, that device does not go away with VDI. They still need something to connect to the VDI. Maybe you don't need to manage the user laptop anymore but you will still take tech support calls about them.
VDI will not solve help desk questions. That user that calls because they cannot launch their document will still exist in VDI. In some cases, VDI will add complexity because now the user has issues launching their desktop to gain access to their apps vs just getting it their apps. Simple example, how do they get a customer document in or out of the VDI? Email? Printing becomes a major problem with VDI as well.
Learning a user lives with dialup class wifi and their VDI struggles to work will become your problem...
kuldan5853@reddit
My experience is the opposite - VDI is exactly great for these use cases, as the VDI can sit close to the (many gigabytes) of data and connected to it with multiples of 10gbit ethernet.
I have had people working with vdi on 160ms latency (basically halfway across the planet) and it was still better for them because of the hours and hours the data transfer to their local machine would have taken otherwise.
For most people, the ~20ms or so of latency are barely noticeable in my experience - what really kills perceived VDI performance is if you don't have a vGPU assigned to the machine but only a software emulated one.
PerfSynthetic@reddit
Going from local apps with zero latency in CAD or drawing in design/photo apps with a Bluetooth pencil to a remote VDI on a 100+ms latency connection is a massive effort to retrain the brain to slow down.
You shift from being able to click on an object and reshape or move with with a mouse drag to clicking and using keyboard shortcuts to resize and move.
I agree with you for the data locality problem. Having a central storage location at high speed is a massive boost compared to waiting for objects to load locally from a cloud storage or OneDrive. But once the object is loaded, the VDI latency will slow development without expensive vGPU on the server side and high bandwidth/low latency on the client side.
VDI tech has moved forward in a massive way, in the last ten years, with improved video performance with compression etc. The speed of light still adds latency problems based on distance. If everyone is local to the datacenter, no issue. Start having global employees and latency issues will impact performance.
Also, don't forget the rabbit hole of vGPU supported applications. If their app does not benefit from hardware acceleration, an expensive vGPU isn't going to improve KVM response times.
kuldan5853@reddit
We are running high performance workloads on VDI (on-prem) - think 24+ cores, 128gb+ ram etc. Omnissa Horizon as the platform.
Performance has overall been excellent for us and the trend is definitely to move much more towards VDI than what we did previously.
We also have cloud based VDI, but those are mainly for contractors or people that need bare bones, no performance access to the intranet via Outlook, Teams, Office 365 and a Browser.
Especially with our VDI footprint being mainly based on Instant Clones and Virtual Software delivery, the amount of management for these types of devices has also decreased massively, ensuring a consistent user experience across the board.
In fact, I have done most of my own work on a VDI for the last 6 years and love this method of working.
gribbler@reddit
How have found costing for cloud? What are your host types?
kuldan5853@reddit
Like I said most of our stuff is on prem (that's the part I manage) so I'm not exactly sure how our true cloud cost is - however I know how much we charge the departments for the Azure Virtual Desktops and they are quite expensive even with our big corpo pricing.
What exactly do you mean by host types?
gribbler@reddit
For Azure VM series or sizes I think is their terminology
kuldan5853@reddit
Ah, sorry no idea as I don't manage that. I can tell you all about the on prem stuff, but the cloud is literally not my job :D
gribbler@reddit
No worries, just curious. I appreciate the response
gribbler@reddit
Surprising there are not more conversations about GPUs, pcoip, or nice dcv here
khobbits@reddit
Yeah.
PCOIP is now discontinued, BTW.
Someone is working on this, though: https://github.com/thedepartmentofexternalservices/teraguchi
gribbler@reddit
There's a few years of usage left..
HP hopefully has a plan. I heard they got shit on at NAB
khobbits@reddit
Yeah, I think the problem is they are about to restrict buying more seats.
gribbler@reddit
I think the professional term to describe them I would suggest, is chucklefucks
Dany_B_@reddit
people will need to get used to the few ms delay, not noticeable after working with it for a week, but will generate complaints for the first month
Maverick0@reddit
We run VDI where I work but are moving away from that for workstations.
For context, we have 300 ish workstations running Windows 11 with maybe 10GB RAM. It's not great, but it works. We're running this across 8 servers with 1 TB RAM each and at peak load, I think thats about 60 to 70% capacity, so we can afford to put a host or 2 in maintenance mode etc.
We were expanding the server cluster, but were juat re-quoted at nearly 4x the initial quote... so definitely not cheap these days.
cakeBoss9000@reddit
You bring up “lower cost” of VDI and it’s… not so obvious that it can be a cost saving measure. Are there a set of users that require specific licensed software and you can’t get it up and running in their specific machines? Are there intensive workloads you need the users to run in separate hardware? How many users? Is this just a security requirement to centralize access?
TheCoolestUsername00@reddit
VDI is great for basic computing.
pmormr@reddit
There is NO way that the business case for VDI holds after the recent run up in server costs. Its always been tenuous at best.
SMEXYxTACOS@reddit
This. We had to buy 6 hosts and they ran $650k. Those 6 hosts are only hosting 200ish employees. Each employee gets 3vcpu/12gb ram
Ikinoki@reddit
Tell me you bought Xeons without telling me 😄
For $650k I could host 1000s of vms.
You need like 3 or 4 hosts tops, dual EPYCs to cover 200 systems using a proxmox cluster with 8 cores per each vm and 16g of ram per each vm and a good dual switch inbetween for reselience.
Did you buy all flash or something? $650k is practically several cloud nodes nowadays but back in 2024 it was like 60 of them.
pmormr@reddit
Hosting virtual machines doing async-ish workloads and hosting interactive VDI sessions are not the same use case, not even close.
Ikinoki@reddit
VDI is just dedicated passthrough resources.
I'd argue it's overprovisioning. you need flexible resources for most users so they can share a pool of cores and drives.
khobbits@reddit
We've been going in the other direction, due to workstation costs.
Turning what used to be desktops into virtual desktops.
IE taking workstation machines (Think 48+ cores, 256gb ram, high end datacentre gpu, local NVMe), installing proxmox on them, and splitting them into a few VMs.
Sometimes that means sticking in a second GPU, but sometimes it just means higher update for the hardware.
Our users will want to run Autodesk Linux apps most of the day, but occasionally need things like photoshop, or jump into unreal engine. So being able to swap over to Windows is very useful.
wtf_com@reddit
Usually the trade offs is that your desktop costs drop significantly and you get a better ROI from the servers themselves.
Ikinoki@reddit
Your electricity bill drops significantly, you can easily transfer, WFH etc. There's a lot of VDI benefits (or even rdp per user)
Cool_Equivalent_4607@reddit (OP)
Thia is a very good point i forgot about this. Thanks
Aggravating_Side_776@reddit
We are looking to get off of VDI on the unclassified side. The only solid use case we have for it is on our Secret and Top Secret networks. But for our unclassified, it's been a mess and we are moving back over to laptops here in the next lifecycle.
ChabotJ@reddit
Engineering industry here. For us overall it's an improvement. As u/ZY6K9fw4tJ5fNvKx said,
We have probably hundreds of different software used and it makes it way easier. Being able to scale up machines as needed is also a huge plus. Be prepared to spend a nice chunk of cash.
Test-NetConnection@reddit
VdI can save money in administration and hardware costs, just not if you are doing it in the cloud. I recommend using Citrix or Omnissa Horizon on pizza boxes for the best possible performance at the lowest price. You can use the cloud as a fallback for a DR scenario. VDI works really well for small teams - instant updates to the entire fleet, instant rollbacks, and users get cheap hardware. Remote work is significantly easier to deal with.
Confident_Guide_3866@reddit
A media company seems like one of the worse contenders for using VDI
BrokenPickle7@reddit
I work for a company that rolled it out for a lot of remote users and it sucked for the most part.
t3chguy1@reddit
If you used to upgrade all your expensive workstations each year then VDI might make sense. Otherwise, for any creative workflow local will always be preferred by the employees and more cost effective
askoorb@reddit
We're laptops for all in country. But for the fee thousand outsourced supplier staff in India/Sri Lanka etc they're all VDI to help with data sovereignty and security concerns.
The laptops are cheaper than the VDIs. The resources required to allow Devs to dev whilst being in a video Teams call in another continent are significant.
Appropriate_Monk1552@reddit
My background: have done very large VDI deployments and have spoken at NVIDIA conferences about them
You don't do VDI to save money. Period. Classic endpoints (laptops and desktops) are FAR cheaper to deploy and usually give end users a better experience.
Setting aside the team(s) that need to support endpoints, of course.
There are amazing benefits to VDI - security, portability, control, fast provisioning, ubiquitous clients that can launch a VDI session, etc.
But you will not save money going with VDI
Duck_Diddler@reddit
My company has hundreds of branches throughout the world. VDI makes a fuck lord of sense for us
khobbits@reddit
Media Company Sysadmin Here. I've worked as Infra guy in places working on Adverts, Movies, Video Games, mostly in the VFX space.
'VDI' is a term that can mean different things in our space. You didn't say where you're currently at.
Most companies in the space that I talk too, try to achieve most of the benefits of VDI, without ever buying into a proper ecosystem, and getting stung with the high VDI costs.
For example, it's rare that we have workstations in the office, the amount of power and heat the high end workstations put out, and the amount of performance you're leaving idle if the machine isn't used 24/7, means you generally want them in a datacenter.
Once they are in a datacentre, you're going to need a remote access tool, ideally integrated with a broker and scheduler.
For high end machines, we will typically run 1:1 (1 user per workstation). We're using Linux PXEBOOT, with fully automated deploying, so we can swap the highest spec machines between workloads, in 10-15 minutes.
For medium spec users, we will typically run 2:1 (2 users per workstation). Running a virtualization platform, like KVM, or Proxmox on the bare metal, and building a VM per user. We'll stick 2 GPUs into the chassis, and just use GPU passthrough to avoid any GPU virtualization. This does have the advantage of you being able to have multiple images ready to go, so you can easily flip a machine between a Linux workstation running autodesk, to a windows machine running adobe.
For low spec users, we'll run 10:1. Running on a virtualized platform, like KVM or Proxmox, but no dedicated GPU. This can run a lot of things, often assigned to developer types. Can compile software but no GPU acceleration, so can't launch all of the pipeline tools.
As far as an end user is concerned, they will either get assigned a workstation by someone in the scheduling department because they need a high spec machine, or just have access to the standard 'medium' tool, in a few template types, like 'Windows' or 'Autodesk Linux'.
Most of this is done on the cheap, using open source or free software. It's about maximizing hardware utilization, without adding extra cost.
fraghead5@reddit
I ran multiple Citrix farms for years on prem, was fine always had users complaining they wanted more power or more features.
We currently use Winodws365 for users/contractors that do not need laptops and they are not that happy with it, but works for those users for the minimal work they need to do from a managed machine.
fachero17@reddit
VDI absolutely more expensive, especially if you’re using cloud infrastructure for it.
aeluon_@reddit
VDI is awesome, source: been managing it for a long time. the cons are that it can be tough for L1s to wrap their head around and it's almost certainly never cheaper than non-VDI unless you're at quite a large scale.
One-Environment2197@reddit
Feedback from someone who has administered multiple VDI envs and is working somewhere that's planning on getting rid of VDI within 2 years of switching to AVD: Don't. Unless you have remote apps that users need to access quickly from any workstation, like a hospital, then there's no benefit performance or cost-wise.
CammKelly@reddit
VDI in 2026 feels like such a pointless step back.
1\ Its more costly to run
2\ It has more issues, see #1
Unless you have secure compute requirements just no, absolutely not. You'd be amazed at how a good SOE Engineer can simplify your environment to remove drivers like client misconfiguration causing issues instead. Also for the price of the VDI setup you can invest that into better devices for users as well, removing yet another driver for VDI.
Outside-Banana4928@reddit
I worked with VDI and VMWare View. We had developers in a "test" domain, and production workstations.
It was WONDERFUL!
One console and I could build machines, snapshot them, rebuild, clone on and on.
I could have 10 machines ready to go in 30 minutes.
They tore ours down because of politics (state agency).
I would kill to have it back.
Lachiexyz@reddit
Are you planning to run your VDI farm on-premise? Or are they talking about running desktops on one of the public clouds?
On-prem, I would think it would be insanely expensive given the price of hardware and the like. And given you said you have some heavier workloads, you may need to look at GPUs in your VDI hosts as well, so that's going to add to the cost.
How old are your current desktops/workstations? Are they end of life and due for a refresh anyway?
Also, as others have asked, what's the actual problem you're trying to solve? You're still going to need pretty much the same infrastructure on each desk whether it's a local machine or a virtual desktop, so you're unlikely to save money there. Or they're trying to reduce the number of people on the ground to support the infrastructure? Not sure the difference between those savings and the costs of a VDI platform will align either.
Are they just wanting to do it because a salesperson has told them it's good and redeploying images is quick and easy in order to upgrade things? If that's the sell, then there are other options out there to achieve something similar.
ResoluteCaution@reddit
Last time I deployed a VDI solution we were looking at 1000/machine minimum after figuring in all the hardware, software, redundancy... nn prem hardware, VMware for virtualazion, and Windows as the os in 2020. Cost did not include any apps.
mat-ferland@reddit
VDI can work, but it’s rarely the cheap button people hope for. Map the ugly users first: media/GPU, peripherals, latency, profile size, and app weirdness, then pilot those before anyone sells 2027 as a clean migration.
willyougiveittome@reddit
Because you didn’t say, I’m assuming the objective is to save money. I’ve never seen a company save money with VDI. Most spend way, way more money. For big companies that are very careful, they can make it close to cost neutral. Definitely not on media workloads. Definitely not with the cost of server hardware today.
The massive increase in cost and complexity is only worth it when the business has an objective that justifies the cost. What I’ve observed is that most companies have moved away from it.
Pln-y@reddit
They say vdi or avd?
phoenix823@reddit
VDI is great for security because your data never leaves your data center and access to the workstation does not require extending the network itself like a laptop would. It’s convenient because you can access your virtual desktop from anywhere you can run the client. VDI is also great as a stop gap when you’re not able to get a workstation to somebody in time. We do that all the time when we have a last-minute HR on boarding and don’t have a machine ready for the new hire. They get VDI and are able to work day one until the physical logistics are worked out. We’ve got some latency sensitive applications so running a VDI in the data center next to the database ensures much better performance than users trying to run a client on a laptop, adding latency. It’s also great for business continuity because if you have to move your employees and recover your system somewhere else you can recover the VDI instance and have everyone working just like before. And obviously, they are dead, simple to provision and deprovision.
The downsides are pretty obvious. You can’t use it if you don’t have a network connection somewhere like on an airplane. Running a VDI for someone for three years is going to cost more than buying them a laptop.
VDI is not going away, it is very popular for these reasons. The only real question is why you think it makes sense for your business.
seanpmassey@reddit
I have real-life experience with VDI in production, and I worked for VMware supporting cloud providers building Desktop-as-a-Service offerings (until VMware got bought by Broadcom and I decided to take a break).
Is it worth it? It depends. What are the biggest challenges? All three of those items can be, but it really depends on the use case and the applications. What use cases worked well? That’s a loaded question. It’s easier to get more details on your use case and tell you where the pain points will be. Would I still recommend a VDI solution? Maybe, but I’d have a long conversation with you first to understand your specific use cases in more detail.
If I sound like a consultant, there’s a good reason for that.
Look, there is no one answer for this question. VDI can work really well in most use cases. But it could also fail. The problem you’re trying to solve and the expected outcomes are really important. And you need to have really good information about your environment to properly scope and size a VDI deployment.
Why do you want VDI? What are you trying to solve for? From a technical standpoint, you can run almost any use case in VDI these days (there are some exceptions…), but there are always tradeoffs. An office user might have no issues while a user with applications that require a high-end GPU and very low latency (ie CAD/BIM or 3D animation) may technically work but have a poor user experience.
There are also a lot of different products and display protocols in this space. Some are better for certain use cases than others.
My not a sales pitch advice is to find a good partner to help you navigate this and decide if you should do VDI because it gets complicated quickly.
Aegisnir@reddit
How many users? You say media company so do some people need high spec compute? Are most employees in the office or is a large portion remote? I have only ever seen one place where VDI was better than dedicated workstations and it was in a healthcare environment. I have seen it in others and it has severe limitations. You need to invest in HA or a single down server could mean the entire company or at least a large chunk of the company is down without a computer.
Cool_Equivalent_4607@reddit (OP)
Thank you for your comment. We have many users ( 90% of the public media in my country) Those who work remotely have VPNs. And I think but I'm not sure that they want to use VDI for just office users and those with not much compute power needed. Cause those in editing for example there is no way VDI will support the heavy work. For thw server down problem, how about if we have redondance servers. If one down the other will go up and the service won't stop? Thank you for your comment again
Aegisnir@reddit
90% is not a number I can quantify. what's the headcount? are we talking 100, 1000, 10000? these numbers massively affect the assessment. You will want multiple servers. I would say at least 2 but more likely 3. You want to have 2 servers that can handle 100% of the load of all your users on each, then have 2 load balancers to keep the servers at about 50% capacity. this will ensure that if one goes down, the load balancers will redirect everyone to the other server. you want 2 LBs because they can go down too and if that happens, nobody can connect to the VDI servers. 3 VDI servers will unlock the best HA in VMware products. you can kind of do HA with only 2, but it's not full HA. Connection speed is also a massive problem. you do not want VDI running on WiFi for example. WiFi for workstations is fine. if the connection has a momentary blip or it drops, users keep working until it comes back. in VDI, everything freezes for a couple seconds or disconnects entirely. if your infra is poor, don't even bother with VDI. this is why I asked about remote users. if remote users will interact with the VDI server, how are you going to ensure they have a smooth experience? you don't control their network after all.
Tr1pline@reddit
In the long term, you will Not be saving money.
everfixsolaris@reddit
The biggest use case I have experience with is it makes hot desks easier to deal with. I can go to any VDI terminal and my session will follow me automatically. The down sides are if you have users with very specific hardware requirements that end up requiring dedicated servers.
Fairchild110@reddit
RIP if you have a ERP/DLP/EDR stack and anyone wants to make PowerBi or tableau reports.
wtf_com@reddit
I’m a fan of it but needs to match the business requirements. Supporting a lot of remote users or the ability to work from home or in the office and it’s a great use case.
More of a capex than an opex cost but with the way things are going that can be a plus.
SpecMTBer84@reddit
Tell them to research why it didn't catch on back in 2015, and it still won't today.
yeti-rex@reddit
What's old is new again.
BlackSquirrel05@reddit
You still need something at the end point for them to connect to the VDI...
There's a bit of a: Well what are you really saving by doing this? Are you attempting an entire BYOD solution? But why?
Do you have users that roam all over the place? Okay you got a point. Is everyone really kinda stationary? Again what are we solving?
kissassforliving@reddit
Media Admin here. VDI for remote programming and traffic works but it never has been entertained for automation and production. I don’t see an advantage in those areas.
xfilesvault@reddit
Is this an AI post to farm for content?
Cool_Equivalent_4607@reddit (OP)
No a real case