All the guys at our local Citrix User Group were going potty over Atlantis Computing's Atlantis ILIO product.
Basically is creates a large RAM-based disk in a virtual machine on your box, with it doing compression and de-duplication of I/O on the fly, so what actually needs to be put down to physical disk is much much less meaning you don't need SSD's or as many SAS disks in the server. With the virtual desktop client's effectively running their disk I/O straight from RAM, they give better performance than most SSD's can which gives good end user experience. Cost was around $120 per client I believe, which seems reasonable compared to enterprise SSD costs. Grab Brian Madden's free The New VDI Reality book from their site if you haven't already! From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stephen Wimberly Sent: 03 July 2013 23:31 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] VDI Server Hardware Critique 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]<mailto:[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]<mailto:[email protected]> The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America www.guardianlife.com<http://www.guardianlife.com/> From: "Stephen Wimberly" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> To: <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: 07/01/2013 06:37 PM Subject: [NTSysADM] VDI Server Hardware Critique Sent by: [email protected]<mailto:[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. === STEMCOR CONFIDENTIALITY AND DISCLAIMER NOTICE This e-mail is intended only for the addressees named in it. The contents should not be disclosed to any other person nor copies taken. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the sender and do not necessarily represent those of Stemcor unless otherwise specifically stated. Stemcor does not accept legal responsibility for the contents of this message nor responsibility for any change made to it after it was sent by the original sender. You are advised to carry out a virus check before opening any attachment as Stemcor does not accept liability for any damage sustained as a result of any software viruses. You should be aware that Stemcor reserves the right to read incoming and outgoing emails. ===
