Wednesday, September 29, 2010

VDI went live



Well, it has been two months work (one month for two TC's and a PM) but we went live with VDI for the first 150 users, 4500 to go.

The solution is based on 6 x (2 x 6 CPU AMD), VMware servers in a cluster with HR/DRS and it is smoking fast. There are two more servers acting as provisioning and file services with the same specifications. We are planning on about 10 users per-core and need storage to suite.

The OS is Windows 7 32-bit, Adobe CS5, Office 2007, Java, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight. It has 30GB C-Drive and a 10GB D-Drive. Each VDI session gets 3GB of RAM and a .5GB swap file. To use it is just like the first logon to a new W7 computer and usage and screen is great, again just like hardware.

Application are native, streamed in if they start in about or less then 1 minute to start and Traditional Citrix servers for problematic apps.

There were lots of little problems to address, such as: VMxnet drivers, SOE look and feel, Printers, bad apps, slow apps, java apps, dealing with image revisions, Windows 7 firewall, networking, building it twice on two hardware platforms just to name a few.

But it looks great in production.

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