What are the pros and cons of using remote desktops for development?

Question

The topic of using remote desktops (think Sun Ray thin clients, or remote X11 sessions via XDMC) on a beefy central server over beefy laptops/desktops for developmet came up again at the office today so I thought I'd seek out some good resources for the various pros/cons of setting up a development environment this way.

Some benefits come to mind:

• IP stays onsite
• Centralised backups
• Lower cost of individual developer hardware (maybe)

Some disadvantages:

• If the network or server goes down, you all go down.
• Limited port usage, if each dev. wants to launch a J2EE container on port 8080 they can't, unless each user can have virtual interfaces.
• If working offsite without VPN/terminal access, you're screwed
• When other users run heavy compile jobs, everyone else suffers
• Running modern development tools (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA etc.) via remote desktop may be annoyingly slow.

I'm sure theres plenty of others, does anyone have any pointers to online studies, whitepapers etc. about this topic?

Answer 1

Not an answer, just IMHO. After developing about 3 month in eclipse through X11 connection fall back to use normal desktops. Power desktop computers already at low cost, centralized backups SVN repository every day, in remote sessions some key combinations work not as expected, as you say central server sometimes was down about 1-2 hours. Summary my vote to not using remote sessions for development.

Answer 2

It also depends on the environment you will be deploying your software to. If you are deploying to a thin client environment it may be an advantage to dev using a thin client to resolve potential environmental issues as early as possible.

The risk of problems halting productivity of All dev's is a very important factor too. This risk also exists when sharing a database server in dev environments, not just thin clients.

It would complicate Visual Studio licensing no-end :) (assuming streaming windows)