VDI solutions. Microsoft, VMWare View, Citrix XenDesktop, etc?

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TBH Ken, I looked at this a couple of years back and never went any further than the planning stage. VMWare's offering was the only one worth looking at at the time - though I hear Citrix have made great strides now. Microsoft's offering is apparently a load of MS products bolted together - rather than one complete integrated solution like Citrix & VMWare (though I'm sure Shini will be along to tell me how wrong I am soon )

It seems ideally suited to education, healthcare and the like, so I'm guessing you'll be able to get a much better cost-benefit analysis result from any pilot scheme you put in place than I was - we're too specialised an environment to benefit that much from it. One area I might look at putting it in is our research centre (basically a call centre where 80 staff do the same job), but, unfortunately, this is in Glasgow, and there's no support above basic first-line - so it's probably a non-starter there as well.

Good luck - I'd certainly be interested to see what route you go down (if you decide to do it)

 

a few years back we've tried both Citrix and Vmware for VDI and never went past the pilot stages. We wanted to replace the Citrix presentation server all together because at the time, a VDI solution was a lot more cost effective. The reason we didn't go through with it, is because the experience for the remote users was not pleasant. Of course the remote office is 92ms away so although the connection is fast, you're still taking 92ms to come and go through our central data center. We also had bad feedback from users complaining about browsing websites. It seemed like when using VDI to browse the websites, when the websites would load pages like MSN.com, it would be very choppy. Of course this scenario is with a remote office.

The only way to know if it will work is by running a pilot or some test and seeing how your environment reacts. Also I am sure that there's been improvements since we tried last.

 

I'm biased towards VMware View 4.5 because I think it’s a awesome especially when you add in thinApp but IMO it’s all about the storage on VDI, if you get that wrong then it won't matter which VDI solution you choose. What did you have in mind for storage? How many desktops are we talking about overall?

 

I architected an 18'000 node VDI deployment last year
and I'm spending this three day weekend setting up a small POC for a big client of ours.. bah, some weekend

there is a LOT to consider, hit me up on skype or PM or something sometime as its a bit much to type up right now

 

I'd go with a dedicated SAN for it. The IOPS would be an absolute b***ard for the amount of machines you;re considering. Also, you'd need to seriously evaluate your structured cabling and switching (if its like any school I've ever seen it'll be crap as its the last thing that ever gets any money spent on it!)

I saw PCoIP demonstrated a while back at a trade show - its impressive stuff. Streaming three different videos at once and it coped admirably. It even looked good streaming hi-def video fullscreen.

 

not entirely true with the clone technology in use today
really the master image gets the IOP hit and thats usually in the 5GB - 15GB range
thats it, outside of that and your looking at user level IOPS for all the rest
on most sans you could fit the 5 - 15GB in CACHE or SSD or something reasonable like that
but you don't need to go 'oh **** i need 50 million iops for 10k desktops

I had over 300 virtual desktops runnong on a Datacore SanMelody SAN with 24GB cache and only 6 10k drives

 

What do you reckon - 10IOPS per user? That's what I was looking at a couple of years ago when I started thinking seriously about it in our research centre - which would have pushed the spindle count way, way in excess of anything we could have afforded. Budgets were a lot, lot tighter then, so I never even went past the initial investigation stage to a POC or anything - but this year we've got a bit more dough to spend - I might start seriously looking at it if we move office up there.

I actually looked a few months back at progress made in VDI and was interested in EMCs approach - which seemed to be to chuck the master on SSDs instead of FC disks, with the data tier on SATA for clones. However, being an Equallogic shop we'd probably need to stick with a high-end PS and use the new de-dupe features in their kit.

 

As far as VDI is concerned I am like Thomas in that View looks to be the better solution, however it's also perfectly possible to have your Citrix environment implemented in a VMware infrastructure.

I love the idea of View and ThinApp and am planning on getting a POC lab running at home over the next couple of weeks (just building up my SAN\NAS storage and benchmarking it, also want to get a cheap SSD for fast caching on Nexentastor to give that a try).

One thing people haven't talked about is the back end servers or the front end thinclients, whilst it's nice having a big chunky back end server farm hosting out your VDI solution don't forget that if you implement something that allows you to 'check out' a VDI desktop your thin client also has to be able to run it well (it's no good serving up 2 - 4 gb equipped VDI's but if your TC only has 512mb of ram and you try running it locally you're going to suffer).

VDI has come on in leaps and bounds since it was first envisioned and I do believe that 2011 will start to see a shift in direction away from thick clients to thin clients.

I would suggest that you perhaps build up a POC lab with all of the different technologies and see which one suits you best, things to also consider as well would be the extras that VMware can offer with the likes of DPM (Distributed Power Management) and DRS where you can power off servers overnight if you needed to further reduce your operating costs, something that MS can't do.

 

generally yes
this is not a light on hardware solution
what you don't put in desktops you replace on the back end

so you would need virtual machines for every concurrent user you want to utilize the system
thats not to say you always require the same amount as thin clients, and they can spin up/down on the fly if done right