Hey everyone,
I manage a team of engineers in a large financial company responsible for bringing VDI to the company in 2010. To this end, we are devleoping a "Framework" strategy where we are breaking VDI out to its core component layers and selecting best of breed for each component. The component layers include host server platform (ESX, HyperV, XenServer, KVM), storage type (NAS, SAN), Broker(Xen, View), Protocol(PCoIP[hard and soft], RDP, ICA, other?), ThinClient&tcOS(WYSE v10L[WyseThinOS], HP[both WES and Linux]). Anything above in BOLD underlined has already been chosen.
I am posting this question because I see we are all doing alot of the same work in obvious areas of VDI. My team is preparing a bakeoff to settle on a broker solution for our enterprise and we have wittled it down to these 2 products.
I would like any feedback based on our usage scenario below on how everyone feels is the best metrics to look at for testing these 2 products with a like backend infra behind both. Also, any general feedback on the 2 products in this scenario is helpful as I am finding out many firms (finaincial anyway) seem to have similar setups and this could be a tremendously helpful thread.
Any help is greatly appreciated and, if we are able to save time by not reinventing the wheel and have this post available to others as it goes along, all the better.
Thanks again for the time. and attention.
Scenario for our testing:
Host Server(s): ESX3.5 Update4 sitting on a dev /24 segment
-Servers will be both BL680c and BL460c with 64GB memory in both.
- Servers will reside in a common c7000 chassis with dual 1G uplinks to the WAN
EndPoint Devices: WYSE v10L thin clients are the preferred choice today however, due to the advanced options available with HDX, PCoIP, Flash, etc., we may look to offer an alternative TC.
-Main concern in thin client selection is a company requirement that any Windows device needs to have a rather large security software stack on it, irrespective of the use of the device. So that entails having the full McAfee security suite including DLP, ePO, AV and HIP installed, auto-updating as appropriate (which really puts aa kink in the write-filter lock on the XPe/WES clients).
Network protocol is, course contingent on the broker selected.
I can get granular as needed with anything else people are interested in reading on regarding this but the above is our basic setup.
As far as metrics, we had originally broken criteria out into a Pugh Matrix but now that we are at these 2 brokers, I want to get as specific as possible with the metric topics so we have 3 sections; security based, performance based and cost based metrics.
Thanks everyone. I think this will go a long way to really get VDI in 2010 into the enterprise.