What is Client Virtualization?

Summary: Dell, Citrix, and Microsoft provide an end-to-end optimized solution for remote, server-hosted desktop virtualization called Dell Virtual Remote Desktop (VRD).

This article applies to This article does not apply to

Symptoms

	What is Client Virtualization? Dell, Citrix, and Microsoft provide an end-to-end optimized solution for remote, server-hosted desktop virtualization called Dell Virtual Remote Desktop (VRD). This solution combines Dell’s client, server, storage, networking hardware, and services with Citrix XenDesktop desktop virtualization technology and Microsoft’s server virtualization and management infrastructure. Dell VRD provides a desktop replacement that is better than a standard desktop in many ways by centralizing management, making IT resources more efficient, improving data security and control, reducing support times, improving staff mobility, and improving the end-user experience. This Dell VRD Reference Architecture describes three validated configurations of a virtual infrastructure hosting desktop workloads. The Reference Architecture enables customers to consider, evaluate, and select the most suitable Dell virtualization solution configuration according to their requirements by providing selection criteria and discussing relevant performance issues. The exact configuration of your hardware, software, and services ingredients can vary depending on your unique business requirements, the intensity of your workload, and/or your feature preferences. This white paper outlines three validated VRD configurations that reflect the optimum tradeoffs between system performance, complexity and cost for each virtual desktop. The smallest configuration is the 250 user configuration. It requires a fairly minimal hardware footprint, is designed with simplicity in mind, and focuses on demonstrating basic functionality. No Shared storage is included in this configuration to minimize complexity.
	Figure 1: 250 User Configuration
Other Enterprise Client Topics	Figure 1: 250 User Configuration
► VMware View	The 500 user configuration provides a high degree of design flexibility and is designed to meet the production level deployment requirements of small and medium businesses. Figure 2: 500 User Configuration
► XenClient

Other Enterprise Client Topics

	The 1000 user configuration is a full-feature virtualization solution for larger deployments. It is intended as a scalable configuration that can be deployed in increments of 1000 users. The scale out to configuration beyond 1000 users does require minor changes e.g. configuration of the Citrix Provisioning servers for superior image management, but these changes are outside the scope of this document.
	Figure 3: 1000 User Configuration
	Storage Configuration Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series iSCSI storage arrays enable a flexible and scalable consolidation environment for desktop virtualization with Citrix XenDesktop 4. As the deployment of consolidated storage grows, PS Series arrays leverage purpose-designed hardware and firmware resources to evenly load-balance data requests, capacity, network activity, and cache, thus offering simple, low-cost operation. With PS Series arrays, IT organizations can consolidate storage for better organization, enhanced provisioning, and centralized control. Fully redundant, hot-serviceable components enable comprehensive data protection, while snapshots and auto-replication deliver online backups, instant restore, and straightforward disaster recovery. All of the configurations documented here support both local storage and shared storage options. The 250 user configuration is expected to be deployed with local storage, although PS Series iSCSI SAN storage provides exceptional flexibility and improved scalability at this size of deployment. The other configurations expect the user data to be available via network shares hosted on the user file servers located on the infrastructure servers. The virtual machine configuration in each deployment is the same. The bootable volume is a vDisk that is presented from Citrix Provisioning services. This vDisk has a size of 20GB to provide enough storage for the Microsoft Windows 7 OS, Microsoft Office and some spare capacity for future growth of image size. The size of the image can vary greatly based on specific OS deployments, target applications and user requirements.