There's always examples out there. Yesterday, I ran into a VMware sponsored white paper on VDI. By the way, I ran into this whitepaper via a blog post by the Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC , Chuck Hollis. Since he clearly isn't in the application / desktop delivery industry per say I found it rather interesting to read his views on VDI. He totally loves VDI but doesn't seem to understand the concept thoroughly enough or at least that's what I make out of it. You be the judge:

"With VDI, users get clear benefits.
It's a full experience with no compromises - an XP Pro desktop is an XP Pro desktop -- it's very hard to detect any meaningful differences.  They get the ability to potentially work on any device (home, office, etc.) and get a full and consistent desktop experience -- no schlepping files around, etc.

And, from what I've heard, the performance is exceptional.  Most PC applications are I/O bound these days -- how much time do you wait watching the disk light on your desktop, or waiting to access a network file, mail server or database?

Now compare that with the ability to run on a multi-core server processor, with plenty of RAM, with all data coming over a very fast storage network, and all that gets squirted out is the presentation layer over the network -- and, well, it's an entirely different performance paradigm..."

This blog by mister Hollis is quite an eyeopener. I think that it shows that VDI is really on everybody's mind. When people start speaking their mind about this "beautiful concept" but might not really know what they are exactly talking about and they are that high up in organisation, it's a IT tsunami waiting to happen.

Anyway, I was blogging about this VMware whitepaper, so I'll get back on the subject. This is a white paper made by Forrester research for VMware about VMware VDI. It's based on a large VMware customer,  supposedly Fidelity. Like any vendor sponsored whitepaper you have to read between the lines but you can there's a lot to be learned from this whitepaper should you ever be asked to white ROI or TCO analysis reports.

"The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on their organizations. Forrester’s aim is to clearly show all calculations and assumptions used in the analysis. Readers should use this study to better understand and communicate a business case for investing in VMware VDI."

Read Total Economic Impact Of VMware VDI.