Warren Ponder, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at VMware, just wrote a very interesting post about which design approach to adopt in VDI scenarios:
There are several approaches or strategies in attacking your VMware VDI desktop deployment from a design standpoint. Most organizations enter their architecture with hesitation and reserve using a very static approach. They plan to map desktop users 1:1 each desktop user will be given a dedicated virtual desktop and some division or swag is made regarding how many desktops they can concurrently run on each VDI server.
…
In most enterprise and office environments, as you walk around you will find large populations of empty cubes and idle desktops. Business is constantly changing and in order to stay competitive companies are being forced to change the workplace. More people are teleworking, using flexible work schedules and becoming more mobile. When users are in two hour long meetings or on conference calls several times a day, typically they are not using their desktops. When three out four people are not working on an exact 9-5 schedule the number of concurrent users is reduced. All of this combined results in an opportunity to revisit going beyond static VDI architectures making them more dynamic and oversubscribing the servers. With this approach mileage may vary in different cases. For example, a contact center environment where users are heads down, might not realize the same benefits…
Read the whole article at the source.