The analysis firm Forrester just released a cost analysis of XenDesktop 4.0 used for VDI, commissioned by Citrix in March.
For the analysis Forrester used the San Jose Campbell Union High School District case study, which had 2,500 physical desktops and 500 laptops.
The school replaced this environment with only 500 virtual desktops and 200 virtualized applications, accessed by 2,500 students and hosted on 40 physical server along with another 100 virtual servers for the back-end.
Interestingly, the virtual desktops boot up and down every 90 minutes, according to the classes schedule. This makes the case study slightly different than the average corporate environment where the workforce mostly uses its virtual machines non-stop.
The Citrix solution, inclusive of software licenses, hardware equipment, implementation costs and administrative costs, costed $1.03M (risk-adjusted present value).
Forrester says that the school achieved a Return of Investment (ROI) of 170% in just five months, equal to more than $1.7M in cost saving:
The analysis includes detailed financial assumptions (like the cost of staff salary) to model the cash-flow trend.
While sponsored, the work is very interesting and worth a read.