White Papers

BP1018 Sizing and Best Practices for Citrix XenDesktop with Dell EqualLogic Storage i
5.4.4
Citrix infrastructure layer: PVS and DDC performance ............................................................ 24
5.4.5 User Experience: application performance ................................................................................ 25
5.4.6 Write cache utilization on virtual desktops ................................................................................. 25
5.5 Task worker – 20% Pre-boot ................................................................................................................ 25
5.5.1 Storage layer: EqualLogic array performance ............................................................................ 25
5.6 Virtual desktop scaling with two arrays ............................................................................................... 26
5.6.1 Storage layer: EqualLogic array performance ............................................................................ 26
5.6.2 Login Storm I/O ............................................................................................................................... 27
5.7 Boot storm ................................................................................................................................................ 28
5.7.1 Storage layer: EqualLogic array performance ............................................................................ 28
5.8 Results summary ..................................................................................................................................... 30
6 Sizing guidelines for EqualLogic SANs ........................................................................................................ 32
6.1 Storage capacity considerations .......................................................................................................... 32
6.1.1 vDisk capacity requirements ......................................................................................................... 32
6.1.2 Write cache capacity requirements ............................................................................................. 33
6.2 Storage performance considerations .................................................................................................. 33
6.3 Sizing Calculations .................................................................................................................................. 34
7 Best practices ................................................................................................................................................... 36
7.1 Desktop profiles and I/O storms .......................................................................................................... 36
7.1.1 Implement roaming profiles and folder redirection ................................................................. 36
7.1.2 Use XenDesktop Power management feature ........................................................................... 36
7.1.3 Boot and login storm considerations .......................................................................................... 36
7.2 ESXi host configuration .......................................................................................................................... 36
7.3 Network configuration ........................................................................................................................... 37
7.4 Citrix infrastructure ................................................................................................................................. 37
7.4.1 Read-Only vDisk .............................................................................................................................. 37
7.4.2 Write cache recommendations .................................................................................................... 38
7.4.3 Optimizing the Windows 7 master image ................................................................................... 38
7.4.4 Allocate more RAM on PVS servers .............................................................................................. 38
7.5 Storage ...................................................................................................................................................... 38
7.5.1 Volumes and datastores ................................................................................................................. 38
7.5.2 Storage array characteristics ......................................................................................................... 38
8 Conclusions...................................................................................................................................................... 40
Appendix A Citrix XenDesktop solution configurations ............................................................................. 41