How many virtualized desktops per server

Top Five Expected Benefits. IT managers expect to cut costs when they implement desktop virtualization. IT managers want to select desktop virtualization products that will be easy for employees to use and easy for IT to manage.

Source: Enterprise Management Associates Inc. Connecting end users to a new operating system on a server can more than double the life of an aging PC while still giving end users all the power and support for new software and new technology they want, according to Peter Graves, CIO at Ionia, Mich. The same is not true of most companies, many of which have little history with or understanding of virtual desktops and are just getting used to virtual servers, cloud computing, and cost- and labor-saving IT tactics, Mann says.

This may explain why desktop virtualization has yet to take off even though it has been around for at least a decade. Numerous surveys of corporate IT managers reveal tremendous interest in desktop virtualization but not much adoption.

An EMA survey of IT managers last year found that the top three barriers to desktop virtualization are all human factors: lack of skills or knowledge, internal political issues, and a lack of resources. Banks, hospitals, schools, government agencies and other enterprises that have tight budgets or are strictly regulated are the organizations that are most likely to embrace desktop virtualization. Companies that have resisted terminal-services-based virtual desktops as too clunky, too restrictive and too off-putting to independent-minded workers make up an untapped market of prospective customers that vendors hope will rush to adopt new desktop virtualization products, Wolf says.

Still, the appeal is there for some customers. Virtualizing a Windows 7 migration gives IT a lot more control by keeping the whole process inside the data center and reducing the hardware and support costs as well, Wolf says. For its part, Microsoft seems to be playing both sides of the issue.

The vendor supports desktop virtualization but is leery of anything that would threaten the primacy of the stand-alone PC as the main business computing platform. On the negative side, VDI implementations are more complex to configure than more standard PC-based networks, he contends. VDI networks require administrators to create virtual machines, permissions and policies governing how the VMs behave and the images from which VMs are launched, in addition to configuring and managing a standard PC network.

George Thornton, network operations manager for the Montgomery Independent School District in Texas, and Landon Winburn, Citrix administrator for the University of Texas Medical Branch, say that planning virtual desktop rollouts can be intimidating to IT groups that are just getting started.

For more information, read the reference architecture for Dell Wyse Datacenter for Microsoft VDI and vWorkspace and try the cloud client-computing advisor tool to get a BOM in minutes followed by a quote within a day. Visit www. Sample use cases may be a kiosk or call-center which do not require a personalized desktop environment and the application stack is static.

You can run up Standard users on one PowerEdge R compute server. You can find detailed information here in section 7. Amortization is over 3 years. It excludes end points, VDA licenses and vWorkspace software. It can be considered similar to a physical desktop replacement.

You can run up Enhanced users on one PowerEdge R compute server. Skip to content. Products Products Overview. Technology Solutions Technology Solutions Overview. Service and Support Service and Support Overview. All you need to ask yourself is: 1 How many virtual desktops do you want to deploy initially?

What is Storage Spaces? Well, because deploying VDI comes with huge benefits, such as:. Some organizations are setting up a VDI project plan to deliver particular apps to end users — apps that require a special thick client, have special licensing or are too heavyweight to install on every workstation. Your VDI project may have a huge scope, but as you get started with your virtual desktop project plan, you have to narrow things down. Performance and storage are hard to estimate, but there are some shortcuts.

The alternative to full desktop replacement is to start with a few specific apps that you want to move to a VDI environment. But focusing on one use case with a clearly defined scope will result in a more refined virtual desktop project plan, which will speed your path forward.

How many users will be using this service simultaneously? Is your internet and in-building network infrastructure prepared for this new load of client-server communications? And more importantly, does your data center have the server, storage and network capacity? You may already have some experience with VDI technology, using remote desktop connection RDC clients to connect to servers in your data center. The main difference between using RDC to talk to a server and a true VDI solution is the scalability offered by that simple connection between client and server.

This infrastructure — often called a connection broker — is responsible for managing the user portal, handling authentication and authorization, starting and stopping virtual machines VM that serve desktops and apps and setting up connections between the users and their virtual desktops or apps. For all but the smallest of VDI deployments, the pieces of the connection broker will themselves consume a number of virtual servers.

You can pack those virtual servers into physical servers running a hypervisor — 10 per physical server, 20 per server, whatever the performance data sheets say for the hardware you have available. Amazon Amazon Workspaces and Microsoft Azure have also entered the VDI game, leveraging their reliable and super-powerful data centers to handle both the connection broker piece and the hypervisor piece.

Other, smaller competitors, including Parallels and Nutanix , may also be able to meet your needs.