Results for: Local Storage or Shared Storage, That is the Question
Citrix is still working on OpenStack
I attended the OpenStack Design Summit and Conference last week. One of the most commonly asked questions was: What are you doing here?The answer is that Citrix has not stopped all it's contributions to OpenStack. We have two people working full time on OpenStack: myself and Renuka Apte. We are concentrating on making OpenStack work well with XenServer. We even in the processes of hiring one more ...
USB over Network with XenServer 6
Notes:The following configuration was employed on XenServer 6 and 6.0.2. I've also used previous versions of usb-redirector on instances of XenServer 5.x, but will not cover their installation. The solution has not been rigorously tested and is not supported by Citrix. This article does not go into detail on how to use the Linux command line. Please refer to Linux documentation for further information if necessary.Since ...
No More Read-only LUNs in PVS, Sanbolic Melio Offers Consolidation, Scalability and Performance for PVS HA
While browsing the Citrix® Support Forums last week, I came across a posting that was written by a Citrix® customer who had recently upgraded his Provisioning Services™ (PVS™) farm from version 5.6 SP1 to version 6.0 and was disappointed to find out the Read-only LUN feature in PVS had been removed.In his posting, the individual explained that he had multiple PVS ...
IntelliCache, Scalability and consumer SSDs
I get a lot of questions regarding configuration and sizing of XenDesktop and I thought I'd share some of my storage ideas and experiences on this subject, starting with IntelliCache. For starters you should read the available information in admin-guides and such to get an overview. I would also suggest you read the following blog post by Christian Ferber: http://blogs.citrix.com/2011/06/22/xendesktop-and-local-storage-intellicache/ This whould give you a great start and ...
PVS Write Cache on local disks – A Real World Experience
When implementing a Provisioning Services infrastructure the decision about the Write Cache location is one of the most important and therefore one of the most discussed. As I already wrote two blogs about this topic (you can find them here and here) I’ll not bore you with any more theory. Instead this time I’d like to share some practical real world data, of an environment ...
VDI in a “pizza” box
Thoughts on VDI Write-Cache Storage Alternatives.It is quite common that the overall cost of VDI implementations is over 80% dependent on the cost of shared storage, especially when dealing with single-tenant VDI instances. Const-effective purchases hinge on bulk storage acquisition, thus impeding possibility for incremental growth. At the same time short and long term system scalability is largely bound to storage design which has to be revisited during VDI implementation life-cycle.It ...
XenDesktop and local storage + IntelliCache
During recent events there have been a lot of requests for XenServer IntelliCache. Some of the contacs knew pretty well what IntelliCache is doing under the hood and some of them didn’t. I would like to summarize a kind of the most frequent questions to give a better understanding of the technology. I just want to point out that IntelliCache today is a technology which ...
Sizing LUNs – A Citrix Perspective
In my last blog I talked about why NFS was "recommended" and mentioned that I'd talk about LUN sizing with block-based protocols in a future blog...well this is it! Have you ever wondered why organizations create LUNs a certain size? Have you ever wondered why some organizations put a single Virtual Disk Image (VDI) on a LUN and others put 20 VDIs on ...
Citrix recommends NFS for XenDesktop…huh?
I've been getting a lot of questions lately around MCS vs PVS and which protocols work "best" with which technologies. And then just a couple weeks ago I was reading this lovely whitepaper put out by NetApp and I saw this statement on page 8:"Best Practice: Citrix recommends NFS as the preferred protocol for XenDesktop 5"Huh? Come again? We recommend NFS for ...