HP best practices configuration for Citrix XenDesktop 7 on VMware vSphere 5
Businesses strive to address IT issues pertaining to provisioning applications to end users and protecting corporate data, including the challenges of business continuity and disaster recovery, security, remote office enablement, and flexible work locations. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has long been touted as a means of handling these issues and more. But a single VDI configuration is not necessarily the answer to all problems; and even when it can address them, it may not be the optimal solution in every case. Citrix acknowledges and minimizes this through XenDesktop with FlexCast technology. Via the most efficient method or combination of methods, XenDesktop with FlexCast technology delivers an optimal end user experience while simultaneously ensuring that IT meets business objectives.
HP and Citrix have teamed up to design and test an architecture that facilitates the delivery of the Citrix XenDesktop with FlexCast technology in a cost-effective, highly manageable fashion. The goal is to deliver an experience to the broadest spectrum of end user types with a minimal set of compromises. While testing focused on validating the sizing and scalability of the XenDesktop VDI capabilities of the overall architecture, the architecture itself encompasses hosted shared Remote Desktop Services (RDS) based on Microsoft® Windows® Server as well as VDI from a Windows client OS.
This document describes the components and wiring of an easily repeatable building block as well as scalability testing conducted on that solution. This building block can be used to scale to multiple thousands of users.
Target audience: This document is intended for IT decision makers as well as architects and implementation personnel who want to understand HP’s approach to client virtualization. The reader should have a solid understanding of VDI, familiarity with Citrix products, VMware vSphere products and an understanding of sizing/characterization concepts and limitations in client virtualization environments.
At the core of this best practices document is a mixture of hardware and software components selected to optimize cost and performance as well as management capabilities. The following sections describe the mix of the hardware and software used to test and design this configuration. The hardware and software listed comprises a building block that can be repeated to scale the infrastructure, yielding much larger implementations with minimal alterations to the overall infrastructure.