Reddit mentions of The VDI Delusion: Why Desktop Virtualization Failed to Live Up to the Hype, and What the Future Enterprise Desktop will Really Look Like

Linked clones (persistent or non-persistent) come with the issues of being about to correctly thinapp all applications not on the base image, and handling user profiles (with persistent disks, or persona mgmt). Dedicated VMs avoid these issues and allow for more flexibility at the cost of more disk space and management (manage them like PCs). I am currently trying to talk my boss out of using thin clients with linked clones instead of full PCs, because it adds extra management and user interruption, not decreasing it.

I'm going to buy this book: The VDI Delusion: Why Desktop Virtualization Failed to Live Up to the Hype, and What the Future Enterprise Desktop will Really Look Like

Anyway, it sounds like they are using View for remote users, which is a decent idea. PCOIP is supposed to be much better for WAN performance, so it might be a good idea (if you have extra time) to see if you can get that working and demo it.

How big is the client? If they can't afford licensing, I am guessing they are small, and probably don't need VDI. RDS will probably be a more pertinent solution.

Great book on VDI (not all negative as the title may suggest)
The VDI Delusion - Brian Madden
edit:spelling

Indeed. I recently read The VDI Delusion, and was pretty astounded by it.

They basically took all of the very worst-case scenarios, and presented them as if that were all that there was, completely ignoring the best-case scenarios. Sure, if you fit those worst-case scenarios, they're right. But for some scenarios, it is an absolute DREAM.

In our call center, specifically, we were in a position where we had to upgrade all of the desktops. VDI, including some additional networking, ran us about 20% more up front than simply replacing the desktops - but we reduced our support by about 90%. Not just in a "we don't do as much" sort of way, but in a "We eliminated our desktop support person" sort of way. He moved on to other stuff, and I spend about an hour each weak on the VDI installation. User experience for them, thanks to running the VMs on SSDs, is quite snappy and pleasant.

Staffing increases are a dream. The call center can buy their own PCoIP clients and plug them in. Within a few minutes, they have talked to the config server, updated their firmware, set admin passwords, updated config, rebooted, and they're ready to roll. I no longer even have to touch desktop hardware for them. So, last year when they expanded by nearly twice as much as projected, my only extra efforts were to create twice as many user accounts, and set the View Horizon provisioning pools to a larger number of VMs.

The power savings have been enormous as well, and I have measurements to back it up.

But, on the flip side, I HAVE NOT moved the rest of my company to VDI - and probably won't. They're not the right use-case for it.