I'm trying to see if there is any way to cost-effectively build a 2 Server Hyper-V cluster that can run 100 high-performing Windows 7 virtual machines that will be all have somewhat different apps that users will install and uninstall regularly and have this configuration not cost much more than adding the VMs to existing workstations as client Hyper-V virtual machines.
We would need VMM 2012 R2 so we could delegate limited management ability of each VM to the end user.
The workstations will be doing relatively heavy software development work with many simultaneous applications running. Users currently have i5 workstations with 16GB RAM and SSD drives. They will need similar performance from the VMs.
We are not a candidate for thin clients because the users will need access to 2 systems.
1. Normal office system running as limited user for normal office apps that don't require admin rights, and these will have access to the Internet for email, web and IM.
2. Developer and/or testing workstation requiring admins rights with frequent software installs and uninstalls and ability to run debugging tools.
If we had thin clients, that would double the amount of VDI clients since they would still need both an office workstation and a developer or testing workstation. With a full Windows workstation, their office system can run on the host and the development and testing systems can run in Client Hyper-V.
What kind of hardware would we be looking at for an adequately performing setup with 2 Hyper-V 2012 R2 servers with enough RAM, networking, CPU and disk space and I/O for this load and with virtual SAN for live migration and redundancy?
I suspect that it will be shockingly expensive compared to deploying client Hyper-V or even VMWare Workstation to 100 workstations, but I'd like to see what people say first.
Even if it costs somewhat more, we will consider it if it add great benefits, but not if it drastically more expensive to implement and maintain.