Ah the stories I could tell...

First off, yes HP RGS works extremely well, if you can afford it and with a
couple of caveats.  It used to have a restriction of checking for HP
hardware on the host end.  Under VMware it would only work if you didn't
lock the screen of the vmware host.  Hence this was a non-starter from a
privacy perspective as any admin could watch the screen of our hosted
desktops without the user's knowledge.

Next up, Citrix + Speedscreen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RMTM7vaMnI.  A
valid option if citrix is a possibility for your desktop hosting.

Next is the PCoIP protocol by Teradaci that then got gobbled up by VMware
and rebadged as VMware View.  I have never tried this, but it seemed like a
solid concept.  This restricts you to dealing with the inherent problems
with a virtualized back end.  Specifically for us, we had
trader/quant/developers who wanted bleeding edge quad core desktops.  Try
creating a quad core XP/Win7 client under vmware...

Finally, our conclusion was that we wanted to scrap all this and get
hypervisors pushed out to the desktop to allow for a generic image that
could:
 - follow the user to arbitrary hardware
 - utilize the resources of that hardware (i.e. graphics card acceleration,
and local CPU resources)
 - replicate to our DR site by having the virtualized image check itself
into some kind of revision control system

VMware ACE has this mostly down, with the exception of checking changed
images back in.  I believe Citrix XenClient is actually the way to go for
this as it includes backups to be able to restore any changes the user makes
to their deployed local image.

Hope this is helpful.

Rob
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