Ask HN: Experiences with VDI-like platforms, but used by developers

[rubin55]

Do any developers here work with VDI-like solutions (virtual desktop, virtual machine, remote accessible, usually with some sort of graphical client like Citrix or RDP) in their day to day job? How much freedom or not do you have in running your own tools, install your own software, IDEs, compilers, containers, etc?

Or is it usually a heavily locked down environment? What about performance (especially in larger environments where the VDI platform is shared with potentially many developers?

Looking for experiences good and bad.

Personal experiences and those of colleagues have been universally horrible and our team is being forced to work on yet another incarnation of this, whilst we are currently happily working BYOD style. Thanks in advance for any shared (horror or uplifting) stories.

[MrApathy]

I work for a bulge bracket bank and have been on a VDI for the past five years, currently on my third desktop. This is extremely common in finance, most developers are running on VDI's since it's much easier to manage and lock down. First generation was terrible, 8GB RAM made life difficult. Second gen was much better, had that up until earlier this year. That one was based on Windows 7, so my firm was paying through the roof for extended support (7 was EOL a while back). Current VDI is actually based on Windows Server 2016, not Windows 10. Performance is respectable, I've got 64 GB RAM and 4 virtual cores, but business users get less powerful desktops that aren't as great. In my firm job title dictates what you get, so as a SWE I get better hardware than people on the business side, including those who may be doing data-heavy work in R/Python. My complaints:

* Machine loses settings since not everything was set up correctly. Outlook won't retain my settings for autoformat (disable everything), due to forced weekend reboots I have to redo my settings every Monday morning.

* Heavily locked down.

* Non-standard configuration, common Windows files aren't where you would expect them to be.

The good: * Software request and installation fully automated, quite easy to get the applications I need with the caveat that the software is approved and packaged internally. I can select from a list of approved IDE's, for example, but if I want to use something less common, next to impossible to get it approved (tons of paperwork & reviews). Typically not a problem since most of what I want is available.

* Can log in from anywhere. No machine to lug around.

[sralbert]

I don't work for a tech company, but my job "requires" employees to use VMWare for everything. I try as hard as I can to avoid using the VDI because it is so slow.

I have to request for software to be installed, and our policy is to only install software on the VDI.

[raincom]

Pretty locked down

Performance sucks

Expect that it is a windows VM

It sucks to troubleshoot, deploy, etc.