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.
3 comments:
charesWhat kind /type of storage are you planning to suport the oother 4500 users as you ramp up? I see you mention a 30GB C drive. What beyond that?
As you scale, what storage array are you looking at to be able to handle the 90,000 to 180,000 IOPS this will require?
It is important to plan for this as we've seen many people scale up and crash the SAN.
WhipTail's Virtual Desktop XLR8r flash storage array can be the primary storage for 5,000 users in a 2U appliance drawing less than 180 watts of power -- all for around $30 per user.
The storage is right now SATA with 8gig FC and caching switches. It will move to SCSI when the scaling starts.
There is a 30GB C: from the provisioning server, the D: is only about 4gb per-user so far.
As for IOPS, we will know more shortly, but the plan is to only require around 45-50k for the VDI sessions and dedicated drives on the provisioning server for the remained, using XenDesktop the load is shared across the file server, provisioning server, profile server, app servers and VMware servers.
Thanks for the tip !
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