We're heading down the VDI route and have started looking at VMWare View and Citrix XenDesktop. We will store all VMs on ESX 3.5. Storage wise would love to use our NetApp but likely too expensive for Desktops so are looking at some other vendors. Any suggestions? Anyone using Infortrend EONStore?My main question though is what is the experience comparing VMWare View to XenDesktop. I'm having trouble understanding the concept of how desktops would be "streamed" to the ESX hosts with XenDesktop.Also, how does performance compare between the two. One of the challenges we need to overcome is lousy client apps that use a lot of CPU. I've heard from somebody that XenDesktop's way of streaming the OS down offloads some of the processor utilisation away from the ESX host onto the Provisioning Server. Is this correct? If so, how does this scale? We are thinking of 600 desktops. I don't want to be saving money on ESX Servers to be spending them on multiple Provisioning Servers.As we are already using VMWare ESX, does it make more sense to use VMWare View as it would be a closer fit or does Citrix XenDesktop have advantages such as potentially less CPU usage, ICA protocol performance.Would be very interested to hear your experiences.
Hello I work for a government agency in Florida, we are currently deploying the first 300 XenDesktop clients with ESX but we run XenApp on Xenserver Hosts for this environment.
When using XenDesktop you have the option of using Provisioning server for OS streaming, the way it works is you create a master image and turn it in to a read only Vdisk which could then be streamed to as many users as needed by dragging and dropping on new desktop or group. This virtualizes your disk I/O but it does not change how or where your application executes its processes that will stay the same. Xendesktop enterprise includes application virtualization(xenapp) which you could use to host your trouble application. This would give you better user density on the esx hosts offloading it to the xenapp servers. Over all you should be able to lower the hardware required but it is hard to say how much without testing your specific application running on xenapp.
This feature saves a lot of storage, because the image doesn’t grow at all. You could use your ESX for the hosts if you have an enterprise agreement with VMware, on my case we are using XEN because is included (FREE) and the improved performance and in regards to the user experience the ICA protocol speaks for itself. We are already a Citrix Shop , so everything integrates, SSL, Netscaler Load Balancing , and few more Citrix products we currently use in production.
On the provisioning server , I’m using 2008 64 bit and is running very smooth with a few hundred streams. You shouldn’t need more than 2 servers if you want HA.
Let me know where to contact you, so we could talk about it.
Albert.
Hi Albert,
Thanks for the information. I'm still a little confused about whether the streaming has anything to do with offloading processing from the ESX/Xen Hosts as I've now read two other posts saying that memory usage was decreased when using XenDesktop which I can't understand how. Does the streaming just read the master image file from the provisioning server but the actual VM workstation is still running entirely on ESX/Xen and all it's memory and CPU resources will come from there. Streaming if I understand is only about where the disk files are run from.
We're also a big Citrix shop so will be using a combination of VDI desktops and XenApp published applications which will provide applications hosted in remote sites.
Also it seems XenDesktop is siginifantly cheaper than VMWare View which sort of makes the decision for us.
I think I may set up a mini lab to go through it myself just to be sure how it all fits together.
It is not going to change the memory required by the guest vm but if you are hosting your applications from xenapp your memory usage will be moved to your xenapp server.And the answer to the question below is yes" Does the streaming just read the master image file from the provisioning server but the actual VM workstation is still running entirely on ESX/Xen and all it's memory and CPU resources will come from there. Streaming if I understand is only about where the disk files are run from"
I am in the process of comparing VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop also. I have installed VMware view and setup and number of desktop pools. What I like about this so far is you can have persistent and non-persistent pools so if you want to be able to save or not save changes that is an option. Plus if you want them to have the same desktop each time that can be done as well. What I am setting up know is the composer piece which can do linked clones. This is interesting since it promises to use less disk space and the ability to change groups of desktops with one change. I have not compared prices yet but will be setting up XenDesktop for comparison.