In the first ever Google Hangout conducted by TrainSignal.com, David Davis (that’s me) and J. Peter Bruzzese squared off of whether VDI was a waste of money (or worth the money). In the debate we both make some good points and end up living to debate (fight) another day. I welcome your comments and ideas for future hangouts, below.
David Davis (CCIE #9369, vExpert, VCP, VCAP-DCA) has been in the IT industry for 20+ years. He has authored hundreds of articles, 10+ video training courses, and co-authored one book. Learn about David's certifications, video courses, and where you can find his content on our 
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I would like to temper a little bit, VDI can be a waste of money because you are doing it for the wrong reason, been up to date technologicly, migrating to Windows 7… When you put vdi in place you set a Desktop service availaible 24/7 in most of the case it is not usefull. So if you want to do VDI it is more for security reason, high availibility… You will not make a lot of saving on hardware and licence with VDI (it may cost higher) but you ll save some great headache on your next migration if you do VDI with virtualizing application: decoupling OS, Profile, and apps. and you ll save a lot of money by virtualizing app.
Great points – thanks for your comments!
I don’t think there’s any loser in this debate. VDI is such a tough sale right now, it can be so expensive to provide an acceptable end user experience. It seems like the tools for improving VDI keep coming along but keep adding cost to any implementation. E.g. You may look at solutions such as Atlantis Illio, App-V, AppSense,NetApp etc. Which all come at a cost aside from even just bringing your infrastructure up to scratch. Improved Network infra, servers, storage etc. Great insight hearing about how VDI was a good solution in a factory environment. I never would have thought about the abuse physical desktops get in that kind of environment. Thanks for sharing your knowledge guys!
I feel VDI can be good solution if you have infrastructure in place. like my company already has VMWare / SAN infrastructure in place and now we are looking at VDI so for us going for VMWare view was good choice.
To some extend i agree to Peter on the redundancy perspective as there is cost involved. However as i mentioned before if we already have infrastructure in place then leveraging on the same setup makes sense.