Don’t be so eager to use ALL the products you own.

VMware vSphere with Citrix XenDesktop leveraging Citrix Provisioning Services.  It’s a familiar solution in my world these days and it works well.  I’ve grown accustomed to the convenience of provisioning out a vDisk to a bunch of Virtual Machines and plowing through business requests for pools of PCs to host business applications.   Making changes to the vDisk and then blasting it out to all the VMs in one fell swoop had me spoiled [and blinded me to some extent].  As user and business requests began to dictate different unique private images, I continued to stream them out using the familiar format as private vDisks. 

It dawned on me that when using private images, it doesn’t really make sense to use provisioning services for them.  I’d rather just keep it simple.  Leverage vCenter’s template facilities to clone out a desktop and then drop the XenDesktop agent on it.  No Provisioning services for this one.  I can crank out the VM just as fast and updating things like VMware Tools just became a whole lot easier.  Not to mention no other streaming issues to worry about.

There seems to be a lot of different components available to use to build solutions for our clients and users and I have to remember to Keep it Simple.