The Pure Storage® and Cisco® Converged Infrastructure solution, better known as FlashStack™, has continued to enjoy a huge amount of success and an ever-expanding customer base who are reaping the benefits of non-disruptive scaling, highly-resilient topology and a single point of contact for all support questions. To this end, we are pleased to offer a new Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for FlashStack with a 5000 user Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp® deployment. Included within this document are detailed instructions, showing exactly how to build a VDI pod that can support this user base step-by-step, all within a single rack.
We have carefully prepared these documents in order to provide a repeatable, turnkey solution that you can build, scale and manage with confidence. Perhaps most importantly, after the environment has been built; it is stress-tested using strict success criteria with Login VSI in order to provide independent, 3rd party validation so that you know your end-users will enjoy a tremendously performant VDI experience.
This highly-resilient design features paired high-availability networking and management components, N+1 UCS server availability as well as Pure Storage’s own robust architecture with 99.9999% uptime to allow 100% XenDesktop and XenApp performance through both expected operations such as code, server or controller upgrades and unexpected outages such as a port or host failure. See the diagram below for a connectivity diagram of the setup used.
A few other highlights of the Citrix Cisco Validated Design include:
- This is the first CVD using Windows® 10 64-bit and Office® 2016 as the base OS desktop and Office Suite, respectively, proving that FlashStack delivers the horsepower needed to power the latest innovations from Microsoft®.
- To provide a reference point, large-scale relative performance testing between Windows 10 64-bit and Windows 7 64-bit was performed in order to show what sort of resource differences are expected between the two desktop operating systems.
- Independently proven resiliency (via Login VSI) of all hardware components, including performing an upgrade of the Pure Storage Purity Operating Environment while several thousand XenDesktop users are actively using the Converged Infrastructure solution.
- Large-scale XenApp testing was performed with Windows Server 2012 R2 using Provisioning Services (PVS) as the delivery mechanism independently of, as well as alongside Windows 10 desktop testing to emulate a mixed customer environment.
- Best practices for all software and hardware layers are included in order to streamline your XenDesktop deployment and avoid unnecessary pitfalls and resource consumption.
This modern, highly scalable solution enables you to attain success with your VDI project no matter where you might be in your journey; be it in the planning stages or already in production. While this CVD was tested for a large scale mixed deployment of virtual apps and desktops, there are FlashStack options that start small which will let you maximize ROI gains from day one.
Check it out via the below link:
Related Resources:
FlashStack for Citrix XenDesktop 2500 users
Webinar: Citrix Experts Emory Healthcare and RPM Mortgage on VDI
FlashStack Design Zone on Cisco.com
Pure Storage, Pure1 and the “P” Logo mark are trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. All other trademarks or names referenced in this document are the property of their respective owners.
