This blog was written by Chhandomay Mandal, Solutions Marketing Director for XtremIO
Citrix Summit 2016 kicks off in Las Vegas today. XtremIO has always been a leading storage platform for Citrix XenDesktop VDI deployments. In fact, a couple of months ago, Citrix and XtremIO jointly held a webinar to showcase how XenDesktop and the XtremIO all-flash array are better together for desktop virtualization. Last month, Citrix published Design Considerations for Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop 7.6 Disaster Recovery leveraging XtremIO Virtual Copies (XVC) and its native integration with the industry’s best data protection solution, RecoverPoint. You can find details about Citrix & XtremIO jointly bringing immense business values to the partner community in my earlier post here.
At Citrix Summit, we are announcing the availability of new Citrix Ready reference architectures for 1,500 and 3,000 virtual desktop deployment pods that are optimized for Citrix XenDesktop. These reference architectures are developed following the Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Program for Storage Vendors (Phase II) requirements. Built on XtremIO 4.0, XenDesktop 7.6 and vSphere 6.0, they provide enhanced user experience, reduced cost per desktop and, most importantly, simplified deployment and maintenance of your XenDesktop-based VDI deployments.
The 1,500 desktop XenDesktop solution leverages a 5TB XtremIO Starter X-Brick, while a single 10TB XtremIO X-Brick can host the entire 3,000 desktop XenDesktop solution. Citrix Ready VDI Capacity Program for Storage Vendors (Phase II) has fairly stringent performance requirements, and the XtremIO configurations delivered these in flying colors with a lot of headroom to spare. The LoginVSI VSIMax was obviously not reached in both cases.
As shown in the paper and below, the 1,500 desktop test generated 32K IOPS during login storm, when new users were logged in at an average rate of one in every 1.38 seconds. We see that the latency was minimal – less than 1ms! Similarly, the 3,000 desktop solution delivered 50K+ IOPS with minimal latency as well. The XtremIO X-Brick can deliver much higher performance, so there is very significant headroom to grow in case your IOPS/user profile is more than the LoginVSI knowledge worker profile.
Figure 1: IOPS profile for the 1,500 desktop login storm
Figure 2: Latency profile for the 1,500 desktop login storm
The other important aspect is the capacity reduction benefits XtremIO offers for XenDesktop deployments with its inline, all-the-time deduplication and compression. As the test results show, XtremIO achieved around 5:1 data reduction in the Citrix PVS-based environments. Both the 1,500 and 3,000 desktop solutions leveraged VNX5600 for the user data.
XtremIO value proposition for VDI has been proven again and again in millions of desktops already deployed. We deliver an unparalleled user experience (think similar to MacBook Air performance and speed) for ALL user and desktop types at enterprise scale all the time. The deployment model is very cost effective – a lower cost than having physical desktops (while having an amazing end-user experience) and a quick deployment time – leading to a successful VDI project from pilot to full scale.
You can get the 1,500 desktop paper here, 3,000 desktop paper here, and learn more about XtremIO VDI solutions here.
