With drives that small (300gb? that's small), especially if you dedicate one disk as a hot spare, I don't see much of an issue with this setup.
Regarding SSDs - can you poll the desktops of the current users, and see how much space their profiles and installed programs, etc., consume? That would give you a much better feel for how much disk you actually need - and SSDs will make everything that much smoother for those who are on the box. Kurt On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Stephen Wimberly <[email protected]>wrote: > Kurt, Our Dell rep tells me that I could set this up on SATA drives on > RAID 5, which scares me. If SATA on RAID 5 would be 'acceptible' then I > think SSD would be just overkill, but if anyone has tried this I would love > to hear your experience. > > Christopher, Good Question. We have over 500 desktops in total, so we > certainly aren't trying for 100% VDI. The thought is that we would use the > first box to learn on and see what our CPU and IOPS looks like. I am > hoping to use the first box "officially" for 50 workstations, but 75 to 100 > if a box ever dies. When we add more boxes in the future we will have the > fault tolerance built in with a "farm" of VDI host boxes. > > An external array would be more than the budget allows, so we are > attempting to go with internal drives. Since the workstations in mind will > boot at different times there should not be much of a login storm. > > > On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Christopher Bodnar < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> What do you expect the concurrency to be on average? >> >> My biggest problem with something like this is that you have no fault >> tolerance. So if this one box goes down, all these part time helpers are >> down. >> *Christopher Bodnar* >> Enterprise Architect I, Corporate Office of Technology:Enterprise >> Architecture and Engineering Services Tel 610-807-6459 >> 3900 Burgess Place, Bethlehem, PA 18017 >> [email protected] >> >> >> * >> The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America* >> * >> **www.guardianlife.com* <http://www.guardianlife.com/> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> From: "Stephen Wimberly" <[email protected]> >> To: <[email protected]> >> Date: 07/01/2013 06:37 PM >> Subject: [NTSysADM] VDI Server Hardware Critique >> Sent by: [email protected] >> ------------------------------ >> >> >> >> Please critique the following "budget" VDI Server purchase. I know there >> is no "correct" hardware, but also want to hear what others think. >> >> USE: Approximately 50 workstations via Microsoft RDS that will run >> Microsoft Office (Most will not use Outlook, but rather webmail). All will >> have Adobe Reader, but not licensed Adobe products. These will be shared >> computers, generally not used by full time staff personnel but part time >> helpers so the login/logoff storm will be more random. >> >> SERVER: >> Dell PowerEdge R720 >> CPU: Dual Xeon E5-2680 (8 Core) >> Memory: 192 GB (12x16GB @ 1600 RDIMS >> RAID 10 (H710 PERC) >> HDD: 16 300GB 10K 2.5" >> NIC: BCOM 5720 Daughter Card >> OS: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 >> Microsoft Hyper V >> Remote Desktop Services >> >> (We may wait for Server 2012 R2 for the deduplication on the HyperV >> guests.) >> >> This will be our first step into VDI, so any advance thoughts would be >> appreciated. >> >> Thank you in Advance! >> >> ----------------------------------------- This message, and any >> attachments to it, may contain information that is privileged, >> confidential, and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If the >> reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are notified that >> any use, dissemination, distribution, copying, or communication of this >> message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, >> please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail and delete the >> message and any attachments. Thank you. >> > >
