Suggestions on VDI etc and alternatives

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

Soldato
Joined
7 Jun 2003
Posts
16,131
Location
Gloucestershire
Hi,

Currently we have 3 IT Suites of 31 machines each, all 3 are nearing there 5 year mark, parts are dieing all over the place now and all 3 will need replacing.

I think i want to try and gain a few things from there replacement:
Easier management
energy saving
Must last another 5 years
Must be capable of running Adobe CS5 / MS Visual studio 2010 (probably the most intensive applications used on them)

We were originally thinking of just removing all 93 PCs and putting in 93 more PCs of a newer spec, but i want to try and get some idea of the alternatives first...

These pcs are used by secondary school students
All have 100mb links back to a HP 2650 managed switch
Those 2650s each have 1GB links back to a 3400CL
From that 3400CL there is a 2GB trunk back to the core network switch.

So essentially the cabling and network is perfectly capable of a VDI solution i'd have thought (the funds are there for a 10GB link from core switch to the 3400 should that be a suggested move)

My biggest issue is the way in which flash and various flash based programs affect virtual solutions, i've only ever used microsoft terminal services for it's most basic purposes in the past so my knowledge of virtual and remote solutions is very limited - hence the need for advice.

Any suggestions from some big brains around here on what sort of solution would likely work best? or am i best off sticking with individual PCs and hopefully being able to get intel vpro working or something for an additional bit of remote management possibility?
 
We are looking at VMWare View right now, and will be doing a pilot in the next couple of months.

From discussions we've had with various technical sales people, VMWare can use PC over IP rather than RDP which allows for a much better experience when using graphic intensive apps (we're a hospital so have to consider things like Radiology imagery).

I can't back up these claims as we're not at a point where we have an actual install on site. The only way you can really be sure that VDI has benefits for you is by getting a trial license and trying it

Do you currently use any kind of virtualisation?
If you don't you might find the going tough without any previous exposure to the technology, but you have to start somewhere.
 
Ah i should have mentioned that, we currently have 4 virtual host servers running 20-25 VMs and a virtual center server

So the intial infrastructure is setup there, i guess we would just have to bolt on licenses and the biggest issue im thinking of is the cost of fast storage to run the VMs from?

initially it would be 100 x virtual desktops with an eye to expand (if it works out) to more like 400-500, so anything we put in to run the 100 would have to be easily expandable to cope with 500 clients
 
The standard advice is that VMWare View should (this may be a requirement for licensing reasons) have it's own VC and seperate ESX servers. For our trial we are removing an ESX host from the cluster to use.

If you want primarily non-persistent machines (which seems likely in an IT suite) you don't need a huge amount of storage, but the disks do need to be fast.
We've been told that SSD's are absolutely ideal for this purpose, but right now the cost far outweighs the benefits, so fast fiber channel disks are really the sweet spot.

You should also look at the application virtualisation features as these make VDI an even more attractive proposition.

I should have some information on bandwidth and disk sizing being sent through soon which I can forward on if they look useful.

If you can spare a server from your cluster and have the disk space, I'd recommend repurposing it for a VMWare View trial.
 
Thanks Little_Crow, some very useful information there. I would certainly use seperate ESX servers for them, how many ESX servers can a virtual center server have connected to it? I know foundation can only have 3 which we upgraded to standard recently so we could fit the 4th server in, but im not sure what the limitation of VC standard license is?

I'm trying to get my head around the client side of things as well at the moment.... there appears to be two options, thin clients and zero clients. I get the jist that one has windows 7 embedded and the other has no operating system on the physical client at all, but what i'm failing to comprehend at the moment is how exactly it makes a difference? What are the pros and cons of both?

Per PC here we're currently only using 25GB of space in use, the rest of the software is installed on a file server and runs on clients from there.

I've had very brief look into ThinApp but while trying to get my head around vmware view and thin and zero clients it just sort of scrambled my brain :p
 
May be worth also looking into XenApp and Xen Desktop and seeing if either is suitable for your requirements. Not got any technical gumph on them yet as only just starting to look down the VDI route.
 
I've found some more information on VMware view which indicates that for us it's not a viable solution at all, so while im still open to suggestions of other solutions (no experience of Xen Desktop so i shall investigate) i think vmware view is a big far no as the costs, performance etc wouldn't work out at the present moment in time.

Maybe one day when the technology has matured and evolved a bit more i'll look at it again.
 
I wouldnt discount the XenApp either. A hospital trust in the north wanted to look at 1200 users for Xen Desktop, when they actually did a proper survey they ended up with 800 XenApp and 400 Xen desktop. May be worth speaking to a Citrix partner to see what they think? I've heard of MS Vis Studio running on XenApp but not Adobe. Worth a shot though for the sake of a couple of hours worth of a meeting.
 
We have a XenDesktop deployment, top to bottom, including Wyse Xenith thin terminals. Any questions just shout. The most expensive part is the licensing, especially from an MS POV.
 
What would you say individual desktop performance is like deathwish?

and how did initial costs work out? was it worth it for the ROI? I'd be interested in an outline of the various costs involved if your able to give me that, be it exact or estimate?
 
Performance is good, we haven't had any complaints about speed.

For info, we have 2x XenServer physical boxes for the desktops, and 2x servers on our Hyper-V R2 farm for the management servers (XenDesktop and Access Controller).

Our 2 XenServers are:

2x Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs (Hex Core :eek: )
104GB Ram
2x 72GB SAS 15k for XenServer 5.6 OS
8x 300GB SAS 10k in RAID10 for local storage of Desktop Cache Disk

We don't use a SAN for this, there is a lot of debate around this area, but the consensus is that for Desktops you don't need the same level of resilience for server failure etc. Also keeps the cost down.

We have a virtual Citrix Provisioning Server on each of the above boxes, this deals with provisioning the shared read only Windows gold image. We chose a virtual server due to lower costs, and our current lack of large scale demand. If we increase the capacity like we expect, then we'd probably have a physical provisioning server, or maybe two. PVS servers would benefit from a SAN, once you get above 4 of them imho.

We chose the free version of XenServer to begin with, and this was fine. We eventually went to the next version up (Advanced) to get some more logging features for trend analysis.

The editions of Citrix XenDesktop are VDI Edition, Enterprise and Platinum. VDI is the only edition that you can buy that uses concurrent licences, which fitted our model better. They are more expensive per-cal but you just have a pool of say 100 licences.

We also have a Citrix Access Gateway in the DMZ to allow SSL connections remotely, this is an appliance but can also be a virtual server on Xen or VMware.

Our primary aim in this project was to allow for hot desking and home working, with the end goal of closing offices. Due to the amount of money saved in closing offices, offset against the cost of the implementation the % was insignificant. Buildings cost £millions per year to maintain :D

If you'd like to talk numbers I'd be happy to via email, but as we get Gov't pricing I'm not sure how relevant it is to you?
 
We've just rolled out 100 XenDesktop devices also using Wyse Xeniths. We're looking to expand that out to possibly 1000 seats, so the solution was built to scale :)

We find XenDesktop to be a great solution. Haven't tried Adobe/Visual Studio over it, but everything else we've thrown at it (including some very basic audio/video/photo editing) it's been fine with.

We run everything off of 4 x XenServers which are all Dell R715s with 2 x AMD 6176SE (24-cores a box :D), 64GB RAM, 2 x 146gb 15k SAS. VMs are provisioned using Citrix Provisioning Server with the golden image stored on our SAN, and all write cache is stored on a slightly lower tier within the SAN (EMC NS-480).

We're using XenDesktop Enterprise, and are currently looking at moving to XenDesktop 5 (currently version 4). For our next set of servers we'd likely bump up the RAM as the CPU is only lightly taxed.

Any questions just ask :)
 
Deathwish said:
Nice York :)

[thread hijack]
Do you use Encrypted USB sticks on your Xenith devices?
[/thread hijack]
Click to expand...

Haven't tried encrypted USB yet, although we do encounter the occasional USB stick that doesn't mount at all. Haven't had the time to investigate it properly though :(
 
My turn...

Have a look at Kaviza, they use RDP by default but have had serious investment from Citirx and can now license HDX. They work on a grid based deployment with Free Xenserver or VMware and the storage for the VMs is on local disk which reduces the cost of the hardware required considerably. File storage as with the other vdi solutions should be on separate disk such as file servers or NAS. The licensing costs for it are pretty good as well.

Also have a look at the new licensing from MS for education which should reduce cost of licensing quite a bit.
 
Last edited:
mrbios said:
Thanks Little_Crow, some very useful information there. I would certainly use seperate ESX servers for them, how many ESX servers can a virtual center server have connected to it? I know foundation can only have 3 which we upgraded to standard recently so we could fit the 4th server in, but im not sure what the limitation of VC standard license is?

I'm trying to get my head around the client side of things as well at the moment.... there appears to be two options, thin clients and zero clients. I get the jist that one has windows 7 embedded and the other has no operating system on the physical client at all, but what i'm failing to comprehend at the moment is how exactly it makes a difference? What are the pros and cons of both?

Per PC here we're currently only using 25GB of space in use, the rest of the software is installed on a file server and runs on clients from there.

I've had very brief look into ThinApp but while trying to get my head around vmware view and thin and zero clients it just sort of scrambled my brain :p
Click to expand...

If you want my honest answer, doing VDI at your size and type of shop is not advisable, both from a cost and feature perspective.

Leave it for this refresh cycle and then come back to it in 3 years, the cost and feature set's would have sorted themselves out.
 
I disagree, with the more specialist tools out there and the situation he is try to deal with...ie a bunch of kids who will wreck and destroy every install of the OS quicker than he can install it...there are good ways of delivering the desktops. Class room environments are the almost ideal situation for VDI where you want each person to get a clean build before they start and with the right config thats pretty easy to do.

The costs based on commodity spec servers, thin clients and the right software license will be comparable to the desktop and will offer simpler management.
 
I wouldn't fancy running CS5 via XenApp. You'd need to go VDI with a desktop OS rather than traditional Terminal Services type deployment I expect. Our guys ran into trouble getting DreamWeaver CS4 to even install on Windows 2003 Server.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom