Virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) are becoming increasingly popular as IT organizations look to optimize end user desktop experience, save time and money, provide greater defense against catastrophic failure, improve update speeds, and provide an easy way to customize desktops for certain users or groups of users. However, many VDI projects fail to achieve expected results. Some of the most common reasons being:
- Cost
- Poor end user experience
- Management complexity
Many of these can be attributed to underperforming storage infrastructure. As part of our FlashStack program here at Pure, we are announcing the availability of our FlashStack Converged Infrastructure offering for Citrix XenDesktop—a leading desktop virtualization solution in the market today. Citrix XenDesktop running on FlashStack Converged Infrastructure powered by 100% flash storage from Pure Storage provide the best end user experience and unprecedented ease of administration at the lowest cost per desktop for any XenDesktop deployment.
Our goal when we build these reference architectures is simple—we want to provide users with data based on real world testing to enable accurate sizing of their VDI deployments. To that effect, we have built a VDI solution based on industry leading components such as:
- Compute and networking from Cisco UCS
- Virtualization infrastructure with VMware vSphere 6.0
- FA-400 series all-flash arrays from Pure Storage
- Desktop VM OS: Windows7 x64 Enterprise with Office 2010
- Citrix XenDesktop 7.6.1 Virtual Desktop Agent using Machine Creation Services (MCS)
We use Login VSI, a highly regarded and respected tool for standardized VDI performance and capacity testing, to generate VDI workloads. An office worker profile is used to emulate day to day office user tasks. Things that are measured are CPU and RAM utilization and response times, storage latency, IOPs and bandwidth.
The end result is a detailed design and deployment guide which can help you plan your next Citrix XenDesktop project on FlashStack Converged Infrastructure.
