I do not know what our server infrastructure is like, but I have found, as a full stack developer the VDI solution to be horrible compared to a dedicated engineering workstation. Since I myself need to work with virtualization and containers, have my own MSSQL instance, my development and build tools in a sandbox (a setup that even makes my dedicated machine struggled with 32GB of RAM and 7th generation 4 core i7), VDI has struggled even more, especially as more developers come on to the infrastructure. Every few minutes my session will just hard freeze for about 10 to 15 seconds, and then when it is working, I can type faster than the system can keep up, and this creates a new set of problems with intellisense, introducing errors simply because of the lag time.
From a scaling point of view, 4 people on 4 quad core dedicated CPUs on 4 dedicated buses is gonna be a better experience than 4 people on 1 16 core CPU system sharing 1 data bus, all things being equal. That is why to give a desktop like experience it can lead to unbelievably expensive server hardware. And we haven't even talked about the additional network overhead, which really can become a bottleneck with too many users.
When developers can work in an isolated sandbox machine of their own, they traditionally require fewer network resources, and the costs scale much better depending on the specific needs (not all developers and development tasks are the same). I think that is something IT folks never seem to understand while trying to find the all-in-one solution. What would you do if you developers need access to GPU features? For that matter, what would you do for heavy CAD or media processing use that requires specialized hardware?
VMWARE does a great sales pitch, but it doesn't match reality. I'd say figure out what you "think" you need, then quadruple it.
