VDI / RDP / Hyper-V / Laptop Challenge

I was reading Brian Madden the other day, and saw his post about trying out RDP 7 for his main desktop system.  After giving it some thought – this inspired me to take a similar challenge myself.

We have spent a lot of time working with the Remote Desktop Services team to enable the use of Remote Desktop Virtualization Hosts for centralized computing environments. 

But what is it really like to use a virtual machine through Remote Desktop for your daily computing needs?

Unfortunately I move around a lot – so if I tried to use a remote virtual machine, I would be forced to use another system a lot of the time as I cannot guarantee constant network access to any location where I can put up a test server.

So instead I am going to try this:

I will install Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop, enable Hyper-V, and create a Windows 7 virtual machine.  I will then use remote desktop on my laptop to connect to this virtual machine – and try to do all of my work there.

I will also run some other virtual machines on the system to simulate a decent workload of other users on a server.

I am genuinely interested to see how useable this will be for me, and what sort of problems and observations I will have through this process.  I am going to try and blog about any problems I encounter – and how I work around them, as well as blogging on my general observations.  I am expecting that some of the issues I will hit will be purely caused by using Hyper-V on a laptop – while others will be around using a virtual machine as my primary desktop environment.  This should be fun!

For those who are curious – my laptop is not a very powerful system for this sort of thing.  It is a Toshiba m400 with a dual core 2.0 ghz processor and 3.3GB of ram.

I will tag any future posts about this with [HDoaLC] – which stands for “Hosted Desktop on a Laptop Challenge”.  Stay tuned for more information!

Cheers,
Ben