Yes, XD7 can deploy WS2012 shared desktops via MCS. I’ve got it running in the lab including WS2008R2, Win7, Win8 and WS2012.

It’s interesting to hear that the people with whom you’ve discussed this topic think setting up XenDesktop is complex.

Over the past 18 months or so, we’ve worked with hundreds of organizations around the world who have deployed XenDesktop and they’ve always remarked how easy it was to set up. Even more interesting was that every single one of these customers used Provisioning Services. And their decision to use PVS wasn’t based solely on the fact that they had different OS images or that they wanted to ensure they could scale out their virtual desktop infrastructures to thousands of desktops quickly and seamlessly when necessary. Their decision was also rooted in their ability to set up a XenDesktop POC quickly and easily and then move from POC to production in minimal time and with minimal effort using the same servers and storage they used during their POC.

If it wasn’t already easy enough, PVS 5.6 SP1 and above includes a XenDesktop Setup Wizard, which allows customers to create hundreds of virtual machines that will host virtual desktops within minutes.

I’ve seen XenDesktop infrastructures get set up in as little as one day thanks to PVS, the XenDesktop Setup Wizard and the direct integration with the Desktop Delivery Controller.

Of course, having flexible, scalable, highly available and easy to manage shared storage that greatly simplifies image management and maintenance, reduces storage cost and enables PVS HA for image high availability, as well as provides database HA without all the complexity and cost associated with SQL Clustering or SQL Mirroring, gave these organizations all the more reason to use PVS in their XenDesktop deployments.

Here’s a quick link that explains why hundreds of Citrix customers have found XenDesktop extremely easy to implement and why the ROI on their investment in XenDesktop has not only been rapid, it’s been much greater than they ever imagined!

http://www.sanbolic.com/Citrix.htm

MCS (the Desktop Delivery Controller) leverages the built-in capability of the hypervisor to create clones and snapshots so yes it can be used on local SR’s as long as the hypervisor can ;-). Where it differs from VDI-in-a-box is limited at the number of desktops that can be hosted while MCS is tested way above the number of desktops that can be delivered via VDI-in-a-box.