Brian Madden and Gabe Knuth have been looking deep at a possible VDI Solution for a University and they have shared their experiences, I must say it's an Excellent Post - nothing like igniting the fires just before iForum? ;-)
On Brian and Gabe's behalf I take exception to those who have commented on this post and are giving them a hard time on their *recommendations* to the University - especially those who feel free to shoot them down without offering any other alternative AND simply hiding behind the "Guest" ID
It is great to see someone come out and be completely open about this process and bring it to the public domain where we can all have our 2cents worth - and for this they deserve and have my thanks, as we're all trying to keep up with all the multitude of different options and potential solutions to help customers get the most out what they've got.
This is seriously only a small section of this, if you have any interest in VDI Solutions you should take the time to read through the full Post and all the comments
VDI for hundreds of apps and thousands of users? A case study where we recommended this instead of a Terminal Server-based solution
Posted by Brian Madden on September 26, 2007. 
A very strange thing happened yesterday. Gabe and I were working with a customer—a university—and we ended up recommending a VDI solution instead of a Terminal Server-based solution. Afterwards I was feeling, “Wow! I can’t believe I just did that!” But I really feel it makes sense. And in fact I think it might continue to make sense more and more, and now I’m wondering if VDI can start to come out of the niche and into the mainstream?
Let’s start at the very beginning. Gabe and I worked with this university six months ago. They were not using any server-based computing or streaming or anything like that. It was a brand new environment. They had four scenarios (or “use cases”) they wanted to enable:
- There are 1200 lab workstations throughout campus. Users need to be able to walk up to any one of them and access any of 200 applications. The users also need access to their own data and profiles.
- They want to publish a remote desktop via server-based computing to people so that they can access the “lab workstation” from their dorm rooms or off campus.
- They want to publish individual applications (as opposed to a full desktop like in Scenario 2) to users on their own computers.
- Longer term, they want people to be able to run these applications locally on non-university-controlled workstations (i.e. student laptops), and they want this to work offline.
The initial plan
For Gabe and me, these four scenarios were perfect for a combination of traditional Terminal Server-based application delivery and application streaming.
We were thinking they could use something like SoftGrid to isolate and stream all (or most) of their applications. Then they could add some Terminal Server and a third-party application publishing tool to deliver individual applications. Our initial suggestions for each scenario above were:
- Use SoftGrid to stream the applications so they run locally on each lab workstation. Install the few non-SoftGrid-compatible applications natively on the workstations.
- Use Terminal Server, along with Citrix Presentation Server or one of the cheaper alternatives, to publish server-based computing desktops. A combination of SoftGrid and local installs would be used to get the applications onto these Terminal Servers, much like the lab workstations.
- The same Terminal Servers, running Citrix or whatever, can be used to deliver seamlessly published server-based applications to desktops and laptops.
- For the applications that can be sequenced with SoftGrid, they could also be streamed to Windows clients for local offline execution.
That was our recommendation and plan six months ago. Let’s look at how that worked out.
more at source...