If you don’t budget for these solutions up front, you will be in for a rude awakening when you see the total cost of ownership (TCO) as your project progresses. There’s no way around needing some extra pieces in place if you want it to function correctly and have happy users. Any vendor that comes to you and says they can do it all is selling you a dream. If you do it right you will require several point solutions to make it function well for your users. VDI is extremely expensive when you build it right. Watch out for “square peg, round hole” syndrome that happens in many VDI projects. Be proactive and build the foundation for VDI correctly up front so you can answer any use case that comes up in the future. Which means angry users as you scramble to “fix” VDI to make it work for the use case. Just building something and then hunting for use cases means the solution won’t quite fit the use case you’ve found in most cases without a lot of redevelopment of what you’ve built. BEFORE you begin your VDI journey… Business justificationĪlways have a clear cut use case for what you’re building. This knowledge comes from years of field experience building many generations/evolutions on Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware VDI centric solution stacks as well as tons of great info from my peers in the community. This is a “cheat sheet” of some of my tips for building FOUNDATIONAL VDI with a focus on user experience and security. Once the foundation is built correctly VDI can be very flexible and rewarding for your company. VDI can answer pretty much any business use case but requires the foundation to be built correctly. Many companies set out to build a Windows-based VDI or DaaS (Desktop-as-a-Service in the cloud) offering for their users but poor planning and execution can lead to hitting brick walls which ultimately lead to projects stalling out or outright failure, as in scrap it completely and do something else after much time and money spent. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is very complex.

Vmware vdi setup step by step