A $500 desktop system will be considerably more powerful than 1/50th of a 12 core box with 1G ram. for that matter, a $200 server will probably beat that.
remember that the users still need to have a machine with a display and keyboard.
the advantage of virtual desktops isn't hardware savings, it's centralized management/backup/etc
Posted Jul 19, 2011 16:19 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
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Yeah it would be more powerful in aggregate but it would also mostly go to waste being idle 99% of the time.
Yes, there needs to be something at the desk to display output but you have more flexibility on quality and speed, buying cheaper machines, keeping existing old machines or even allowing users to bring their privately-owned systems to use for display only.
Yes, the centralized management is a huge win for virtualization. I also wanted to point out that it isn't cost-prohibitive as well.