Results for: Saving IOPS with Provisioning Services
Why PVS isn’t going away
There seems to be quite a bit of discussion on Citrix replacing Provisioning Services (PVS) with Machine Creation Services (MCS), especially in the new release hopefully going GA soon. In light of the new release, while MCS is expanding and finding more uses, I think people forget why PVS is still relevant and the best use cases for it. Let's start with the common objections to ...
Reference Architectures that Scale: Citrix XenDesktop on FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud
I’ve been collaborating with Cisco, Microsoft, and NetApp solution architects to create a Citrix XenDesktop reference implementation that customers can deploy as a complete VDI solution. We are focused on scalability testing of this joint solution stack: Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 and Provisioning Services (PVS) 6.1 using Microsoft Private Cloud on Cisco FlexPod, which incorporates Cisco UCS blade servers, switches, and NetApp storage. The goal of ...
The New IBM SmartCloud Desktop Infrastructure (SDI) Reference Architecture with Citrix Desktop Virtualization
I want to share some thought around our recent IBM SDI reference architecture work which I had the privilege to lead architecturally from our side. When we initiated our work last year, identifying the most suitable desktop virtualization solutions to be included was a critical starting point. IBM and Citrix clearly enjoy a long and successful relationship, but, importantly, my personal experience in working with clients ...
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 ...
Finding a Better Way to Estimate IOPS for VDI
Planning storage is probably the most difficult part of architecting any VDI solution and estimating IOPS is probably the most difficult part of planning the storage. For a little background on some of the discussions I have had around this topic, see my Saving IOPS with Provisioning Services blog and the associated comments. Since posting that blog in August, I have had fielded multiple requests ...
Saving IOPS with Provisioning Services
Sometimes the obvious is not quite as obvious to others as it is to you. Given my role as an architect I have spent countless hours looking at storage performance and the impact of it on Desktop Virtualization also known as VDI. It is my belief that storage performance is directly correlated with the user experience. Unfortunately, purchasing higher performing storage increases the cost of ...
XenDesktop Scalability Webinar Q&A Part 2
This is the second blog in a two-part series to respond to the remaining unanswered questions from my Citrix, Microsoft, HP: Best Practices for Scaling Virtual Desktops webinar on June 17, 2010. I covered the first half of the questions in XenDesktop Scalability Q&A Part 1. Some questions with similar content have been combined into a single question and others have been adjusted for typing ...