If you don't mind me asking, what manufacturer/model thin clients are you using that have this kind of power for $200? This could be great for us if it runs everything smoothly. We need to be able to run the full autodesk 2011 package as well as Adobe CS5 in most of our labs. We have been purchasing Dells for about $500 a piece (including monitor, mouse & keyboard) but recently we have lost state aide and they want to charge us around 900-1100 per.
There are plenty of zero client and thin clients in the 2-400.00 range that can do dual monitor. The applications you run on them do not relate to the hardware. Remember the processing is not done client side. Your problem will be having a backend server infrastructure capable of handling all those instances of CS5 running at the same time. Tteradici just announced at vmworld a PCI-E card that offloads PCoIP from the server cpu to the card. This in your server with a hardware based PCoIP zero client would make 3d applications (like CAD) on thin clients a reality. You are also going to have problems with disk access with write heavy applications and are going to need some high IOP storage.
For example, 10zig announced at vmworld a $248.00 zero client that has hardware PCoIP. That would be enough for you if your backend could sustain the desktop load. I'm not sure what EDU discounts on that device are, but I just requested a demo unit. Our current environment is a mishmash of different thin client and zero client devices (and old PC's repurposed as thin clients). We are looking to standardize this year and are doing a serious cost analysis on LG, Samsung, 10zig, Panologic, Wyse, and IGEL. I'm heavily leaning to zero clients as they are cheaper (no need for windows costs) and are easier to manage (their only purpose is to connect you to a virtual desktop. Nothing to patch, install, or manage on the client). This really puts our choices down to 10zig or Wyse (I'm not a big fan of the panologic devices we have.) who both have zero clients in the $2-350.00 range for edu.
So I guess what I'm saying is that your cost is not going to be on the client end. It's going to be in your datacenter. However, you need to get a real cost profile by comparing the money saved in support, power consumption, and management when you calculate your final cost per desktop. Some zero clients use under 7 watts of power (panologic clients for example use 6.5 watts of power at max and .2 when sleeping). Combine that with intelligent power management of your virtual desktops and the servers that run them and you can really make a cost savings.
Another interesting factor is that you do not need to buy thin clients out of the gate. You can repurpose your old PC's with either software thin clients that companies like IGEL and Wyse sell (I think IGEL's is like $50.00 a seat), or do what we did and roll your own windows build that uses a shell replacement to only allow access to the vmware view client. We have some computers acting as thin clients that are 7 years old Dells and are running windows 7 64bit virtual desktops used by IT students. The computer boots up, auto logs on as a restricted user and instead of a desktop, you just get the view client. If you need a desktop you ctrl-alt-delete and log out holding shift. Then you can login as a user without the shell replacement. The windows view client supports dual monitor and all the usb ports. The only thing that doesn't work that users expect from it is the dvd-rom.
Honestly, your biggest problem is the same problem we recently had to solve. You said you use novell. VMWare view and Citrix XenDesktop do not work with Novell, you will need a 3rd party broker. We tried a few and honestly didn't like them. We ended up selling our souls to MS and migrating to AD (although with the recent sell off of Novell, that was not a bad thing at all).
We might be getting a bit too far off topic though. So if you want, feel free to PM me or start a vdi thread. My life for the last 3 years has been planning and deploying vdi. We are just about finished and if everything goes good, by this time next year will have no physical desktop computers on campus. We have been taking a slow approach of piloting a classroom each semester and swapping it out to virtual desktops. This has allowed us to try different thin clients in each classroom to see what worked well and what was a PITA. At the end of this semester we will make our final decision and standardize on the client. After that it will just be replacing the few hundred thin clients we have to a standard and the rest of the physical computers with virtual computers. We also want to demo vmware view's local mode to see if it will be possible to replace notebook users with virtual machines.
I want to stress that there is literally dozens of ways to virtualize the desktop experience. Joemonkey suggested Citrix which is a great option, MS has app-v or terminal services. You can choose to virtual the desktop, or just virtualize the application delivery, you can choose server based or client based options, etc. Depending on your needs a completely different virtualization solution could be the way to go. There are tons of competing and amazing technologies out there. It's not a throw together project for sure and there is no "right way" to do it.
For example, if you don't need app sandboxing, Unidesk has a awesome layering system for making application layers and creating desktops with them. If you don't need desktops anywhere, NxTop looks like a great way to execute VM's locally and drastically lower server side costs. In fact our first 2 deployments of VDI were radically different based on the direction we wanted to go and our learning of how our solution worked in our environment. Our first pilot we had Novell so we used panologic as a broker and unidesk to provision desktops. We had AD by our second deployment so we used VMWare view to broker and unidesk for desktop provisioning and app/user layers. We then decided we wanted a unified application delivery no matter if you are on a physical or vm so we added in thinapp and now our unidesk layers are just a thinapp in a layer for any application that works with thinapp. Our first deploy was all local disks on the servers. We discovered that we became IO bound this way before we became ram or cpu bound. We have since moved on to centralized storage/local storage hybrid and will probably be all centralized storage with all SSD's by next capital cycle. However, if I didn't have the requirement of each student bringing their own device, I would probably go the NxTop route. It solves a lot of problems like how to deliver a vm to a notebook computer in a area with suspect internet service.
Sorry for rambling on so much
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