I have added a Vista desktop to the VDM2 demo I put out earlier. https://vdm2.oas.co.za/ I made myself a bit unpopular with VMware by saying that Xendesktop could do Vista first, OK, OK VMware was there first. So I have righted that wrong.
The username is demo, and the password demo.
The irony of the whole Vista thing is that the first thing most of us will do with our VDI environments will be to make the Desktop look like NT4. Most of the same tweaks that were done under terminal services will remain applicable to VDI.
Comparing it to Xendesktop it's interesting to see how the VDM2 also redirects client hard drives, USB devices and printers. We have Xendesktop using ICA and VDM2 using a modified RDP. In the African environment the ICA factor may still be relevant due to our awful telecommunications (low bandwidth and high costs), probably less so in the First World. The "ICA" factor will no doubt get some people het up, this is my opinion you are perfectly entitled to your own, in any event we have the "Callista" factor lurking out there which may upend the entire debate. The transient nature of the Internet here means that speed comparisons on this demo would definitely not be a good benchmark; you'll need a proper lab for that.
The upside of the modified RDP is that it supports USB devices and does print redirection, the downside is that it won't work with most existing thin clients (currently supported -Wyse S10 VDI Edition,Wyse V10L,Wyse V90,Wyse V90LNeoware c50 (XPe)), so it clearly works on ThinOS and XP embedded. It may well be that you could reflash ThinOS clients to add the functionality, although I am sure Wyse would prefer to sell you new ones (not going to happen here). Also it being a client you can install on XP, I see no reason why your thin client vendor couldn't add it to the stack of software on any XP embedded client. A wrinkle nonetheless that one needs to be mindful of.
Printing is going to be a factor, the Citrix Universal Printer driver is pretty good but whether it's necessary or not depends on your environment. The Thinprint/Uniprint guys will no doubt release VDI versions of their universal printer drivers - now that would be a good acquisition VMware! Try print something from notepad (bandwidth to Africa remember) and tell us how it handles your print drivers(comment below).
Incidentally in case you were wondering, all the Vista clients, VDI servers etc. are all running on the one ESX3.5 host, same specifications etc. on the VMs.
I have also moved the Vista machines into a GPO to try to manage the sessions, but also to force through the "Classic S