I have a quick question regarding Microsoft Remote Desktop Services in a virtualized environment using VMWare. This environment will actually be hosted in a large data center with in a cloud that is offered. This particular data center has the ability to establish high speed point to point connections with customers via metro-ethernet who are hosted in the cloud. The result is that customers can actually host their corporate domain in the data center's cloud.
Put the merits of such a configuration aside for the time being. Believe me when I say that the cloud is stable and had enough hardware behind it to rival a dedicated cabinet. My question has to do with RDS in a virtual environment, which would amount to virtual desktops hosted on a virtual server. I've read that this works without issue using Hyper-V and VMWare. But before I take the plunge I wanted to get some feedback from the community.
Best Answer
Using "cloud" infrastructure is a very cost efficient way of deploying virtual desktop infrastructure. To be honest, usually it's in a private "cloud" (i.e. a collection of servers running under vSphere, SCVMM, or some other hypervisor management solution, on the clients site).
The biggest issue you will have is latency; and this has very very little to do with the platform, and far more to do with the links to the server.
For what it's worth we have many terminal servers running on ESXi. Everything from a small 3-user terminal server with 3Gb of RAM up to large terminal servers with 64Gb of RAM that have close to a hundred people on them.