VDI and Chromebooks

VDI, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, right? In the K-12 market it hasn't made a whole lot of sense.  There are some good use cases for it (customized lab environments anyone?), but the cost of maintaining it hasn't made sense.  The dollar cost and the manpower cost, too.  Traditionally, school technology departments have been understaffed.

VDI falls into the category of nice to have, but not very feasible to implement.  The obvious problem is cost.  You want me to deploy $300+ thin clients?  Wait, I'm getting fully functional refurbished computers for $300 or $500 (depends on the model).  Ok, so just deploy those desktops and then use them as clients.  That would work... Except now we're maintaining a bunch of desktops and a bunch of virtual machines.  Remember what I said about the manpower cost?  We're already under staffed as it is, who's going to keep all of those machines up and running?

That's where the Chromebooks come into play.   They can be had for less than $300, which makes them cheaper than thin clients.  And those are even portable in a laptop form factor too.  How about desktops?  That hasn't been as cheap until just recently (see my post here http://practicalschooltech.blogspot.com/2014/02/an-affordable-chromebox-finally.html).  Combine that $179 Chromebox with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and now you've got a full thin client for around $300 too.

You might be wondering now, what's the big deal.  Now you've got to maintain all of those Chrome devices and the VDI.  Chrome devices don't have that much administrative overhead.  They patch themselves, there's no software to install, and a reboot fixes most problem.  Still got problems?  Swap one Chrome device for another, all the users stuff follows their login so it's seamless to them, and work on the malfunctioning device on your own schedule.  The users are happy and the tech staff is happy too.

This sounds good in theory, but how feasible is it, and how well does it work in practice?  I agree with the theory and in practice I don't know, because I haven't tried it yet.  But the feasible-ness has been a real question wondering around in my mind.  Sure, there were remote clients available for the Chrome devices, but no body had a whole package put together to build VDI and use a Chrome device as a client.  Was I missing something?  Was it just so obvious nobody had done it?  Was it not possible?  Did it just not work very well?

Since I don't have any VDI infrastructure in place I couldn't really test how well it worked in practice.  I've remoted hundreds of machines from my Chromebook, using both VNC and RDP.  I haven't had any problems there, but I'm not a typical end user.  I know the addresses of the machines that I'm connecting to and I'm so used to minor hiccups my mind just glosses right over them and I don't even notice them anymore.  With out actually having all the pieces to try it myself I needed to see someone else doing it, or at least trying it.

That's when I stumbled upon Citrix's VDI-in-a-Box setup.  Specifically, their HTML5 Receiver (which ironically, specifically targeted Chrome at first but now they've switched to HTML5).  Here's a post from Citrix themselves talking about it, http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/12/05/new-in-vdi-in-a-box-5-4-built-in-html5-receiver/, and check it out.  The first use case they mention is "schools", in fact that's the opening word of the post.  Exactly what I was looking for, somebody that was trying to put the pieces together.  Now I've just got to get my hands on a demo copy of the VDI-in-a-Box so I can try it out and see how it works.

Anybody out there had any experience with this yet?