Horizon View Composer and Linked Clones

One of the main reasons a virtual desktop project fails to deliver, or doesn't even get out of the starting blocks, is down to the heavy infrastructure and storage requirements. The storage requirements in particular are often seen as a huge cost burden, which can be attributed to the fact that people are approaching a VDI project in the same way they would approach a physical desktop environment's requirements. This would mean that each user gets their own dedicated virtual desktop and the hard disk space that comes with it, albeit a virtual disk; this then gets scaled out for the entire user population, so each user is allocated a virtual desktop with some storage.

Let's take an example. If you had 1,000 users and allocated 250 GB per user's desktop, you would need 1,000 * 250 GB = 250 TB for the virtual desktop environment. That's a lot of storage just for desktops and could result in significant infrastructure costs, which could possibly mean that...