Question about virtualization

[Fiveohhh]

I'm going to be helping move an office with ~8 pc's into a new building and I have been thinking about virtualizing the workstations. My main reason for this would be ease of backup and ease of deployment of a new machine. There will also be a server with sbs2k3 setup as DC.

I looked into xendesktop, but that seems to be way overkill/ more complicated than I would like to deal with. I would like to just create the xp pro vm's and use remote desktop to access them, but I'm assuming I would need two licenses for every user than. I also am not too keen on video and RDP. Rarely do they need live video, but I would like to find a way that still allows for smooth video.

I was impressed by the Citrix HDX videos and idea of a golden image, but I don't think it is justifiable for this situation. I could get a budget for software of ~$2k and I have ~4-5k to drop on the server.

Can anyone think of a decent solution for this situation? Remote access is another big reason I'm trying to go virtual instead of leaving all the pc's on all the time.

edit: the kind of work they do will mostly be web based apps, nothing really processor intensive.

 

[tomt4535]

You can look into Vmware View, which used to be called Vmware Desktop Infrastructure. I have no personal experience with it, but it is another option to do what you would like. They have a 60 day trial of it so you can test it out and see if it works.

 

[Fiveohhh]

I had looked into view and it seems easier to deploy, but until they get PCoIP released I don't want to go that route and hope that it will be releases in the near future. I would rather have a solution that works today, than one that may work tomorrow.

I did just test out win 7->win 7 remote desktop and the video played through WMP was stunning, but it uses client side rendering and I would like to move away from that.