VDI / Terminal services

[funscott]

4 -5 year cycle. 100 - 110 PCs per year and 10 laptops.

 

I agree with you about laptops, pain in the neck.

 

dell wyse xenith pro 2 (zero client not thin client)

 

I will be starting the POC in a couple of weeks s will update how we are getting on with it but if all goes well feel free to come take a look.

[Dave_O]

4 -5 year cycle. 100 - 110 PCs per year and 10 laptops.

 

I agree with you about laptops, pain in the neck.

 

dell wyse xenith pro 2 (zero client not thin client)

 

I will be starting the POC in a couple of weeks s will update how we are getting on with it but if all goes well feel free to come take a look.

 

We have 100 of the (now Dell) Wyse V10L s with Thin OS. They work fine with both terminal services, which runs on half of them and VDI which runs on the other half. If I could improve the VDI experience then that would be a move in the right direction.

[Dave_O]

We have a hp eva4400 (fiber channel disk 15k disk x 48)

 

we will be using Dell r910 in a cluster using hyperv (initial 2) increasing to 3 in year 3

 

server specs will be quad 8 core (32 cores)

512gb ram

10gb nics

the SAN will be used for CSV

 

but the desktop will be pooled running in ram so no IOPS to worry about

 

netowrk is being upgraded to 10gb,

 

 

comes down to end user experience, zero clients instead of thin clients (doesnt look good), TS old tech limited end user device access (published through UAG) we require vendor neutral access.

 

it also comes down to how our POC delivers if its not as good or better than our current end user experience it will be getting canned.

 

What are the requirements on the hosts? If you are running 50 VMs per host at say 2Gb memory per VM and a 30Gb VM HD how much memory would you need when running the Atlantis solution?

[funscott]

http://www.google.co.uk/url?q=http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/downloads/DisklessVDI_Solution_Brief_Citrix.pdf&sa=U&ei=tODWUpvgM6X17AaP8IDIBg&ved=0CA4QFjAB&usg=AFQjCNE__0MsQphREjDI6tnB_oxr30LuqQ

[PotNoodleTech]

In short I am struggling to see the justification for spending this amount of money on a solution that has limited ROI and applicability

 

This. And also - if you think the Support time required will be significantly lower for a VDI/RDP set up then you may find out 3 years down the line that you were mistaken.

 

At a risk of making a huge generalisation (im going to do it anyway) people who are REALLY really eager about VDI/RDP often tend to be people who have not actually used it in anger yet? Once you use it in anger over a long period I garuntee you will not be as impressed as you were and you will find yourself dreaming about fat clients in your restless sleep

[Dave_O]

This. And also - if you think the Support time required will be significantly lower for a VDI/RDP set up then you may find out 3 years down the line that you were mistaken.

 

At a risk of making a huge generalisation (im going to do it anyway) people who are REALLY really eager about VDI/RDP often tend to be people who have not actually used it in anger yet? Once you use it in anger over a long period I garuntee you will not be as impressed as you were and you will find yourself dreaming about fat clients in your restless sleep

 

Interesting, I take it you have had a bad experience of VDI.

[superatticman]

This. And also - if you think the Support time required will be significantly lower for a VDI/RDP set up then you may find out 3 years down the line that you were mistaken.

 

At a risk of making a huge generalisation (im going to do it anyway) people who are REALLY really eager about VDI/RDP often tend to be people who have not actually used it in anger yet? Once you use it in anger over a long period I garuntee you will not be as impressed as you were and you will find yourself dreaming about fat clients in your restless sleep

 

You are right, as far as supporting it goes what you are effectively doing is shifting one set of problems for another. Chances are you and your helpdesk already have the general skills required to maintain a traditional thick client environment. However, to be able to support a Citrix based VDI infrastructure takes a lot skill and can provide some extremely frustrating issues to deal with.

 

Can't say I'm a real fan of VDI having been involved with it for around 4 years now.

 

Fine in a huge office with 8000 clients, ability to work from home, hot desk etc.

 

But in a School, really? Seem to recall there was an interesting thread on the subject a couple of years ago where someone 'owned up' to inflicting VDI on their customers because they had more of an interest in the technology than anything else.

[Dave_O]

But in a School, really? Seem to recall there was an interesting thread on the subject a couple of years ago where someone 'owned up' to inflicting VDI on their customers because they had more of an interest in the technology than anything else.

 

Guilty m'lud.

[funscott]

time will tell. almost got the POC installed. so far not difficult just time consuming.

 

also noet when I say its a school its an international boarding school so have alot of foreign students (60%) who require remote access over holiday periods etc.

[superatticman]

Guilty m'lud.

 

Just re read the article again. Total respect to you putting your hands up to an apparent error of judgement. Seems it all worked out well in the end

 

I guess things have moved on since then. Xendesk 7 and a cutting edge SAN for example provide a near physical PC experience. However the fundamental issues with supporting it all remain. And all this to provide an experience that is close, but not quite up to a decent physical machine.

[jamin100]

We use VDI here.

 

We spent 40k on 3 servers, 1 broker and 2 hyper-v hosts. Each host has 196GB RAM and 800GB of hard drive space on 4 x 200GB server grade SSD's

We use Dell's vWorkspace as the management interface and hyper-v on server 2008R2 for the VM's

 

We have around 100 desktops (very old,7 years +) and around 90 laptops connecting to it wirelessly. It works well for us

[Dave_O]

Just re read the article again. Total respect to you putting your hands up to an apparent error of judgement. Seems it all worked out well in the end

 

I guess things have moved on since then. Xendesk 7 and a cutting edge SAN for example provide a near physical PC experience. However the fundamental issues with supporting it all remain. And all this to provide an experience that is close, but not quite up to a decent physical machine.

 

Although we have just replaced the 4 ESXs supporting the VDI with one and (thanks to funscott pointing us in the direction of Atlantis ILIO) are giving it another go. Even if it doesn't work as expected we can still use the kit with little loss of kudos or capital

[funscott]

To sum up.

 

we are running a POC with the following hardware

 

Dell r910 (32 core @2.0ghz) 256gb ram (ex lease 4.5k)

 

running 2012 datacenter R2

 

within the Hyperv we are running 2012 standard r2 with scvmm 2012 r2 / xendesktop 7.1

 

to utilize RAM we will be using atlantis ILIO (not got that far yet dave)

 

any storage we need at the moment (VHD / Hyperv file) are hung off a HP eva 4400 (48 x 15k fiber channel disk)

 

we can get 3 x r910 for under 20k anticipating a maximum 350 concurrent users between the cluster . we will utilize the POC server but upgrade to 512gb RAM on each server. a fourth box may be purchased if required.

 

we are also in the process of deploying 10gb backbone with 1gb to the desktop (procurve 2920s)

Edited January 30, 2014 by funscott

[Dave_O]

Mine is an R720 with 2 x 2Hz 8 core processors 256Gb memory and 12 x146Gb 15K drives RAID 10 (to get the IOPs) running ESXi with Atlantis ILIO (in memory). This will support between 50 and 70 VMs (we only need 50) . We already have VMware VDI licensing for 100 concurrent so no extra cost there. Have tested Atlantis ILIO with 10 VMs and it performs well ie login times reduced from 1 min 30 secs to 45 secs and general usability is quicker. Awaiting kit delivery and final testing.

 

Funscott - don't let VDI consume too much of the SAN IOPs (hence the reason for putting in local storage in our solution). Having said that ILIO should reduce the IOPs required by a large amount. We found that shutting down all W7 VMs reduced IOPs on the SAN by 4000 (as reported by the V7000).

[funscott]

wont be using the SAN when we have the ILIO software as we are doing a disk-less pooled vdi. you are using your local 10 disks for in place persistent which we dont need. the SAN will only be used for profile storage.

[Dave_O]

wont be using the SAN when we have the ILIO software as we are doing a disk-less pooled vdi. you are using your local 10 disks for in place persistent which we dont need. the SAN will only be used for profile storage.

 

What about the replication server for diskless? Atlantis recommend having one to maintain session sate in the event of failure. Still if your users accept this..

Edited January 30, 2014 by Dave_O

[funscott]

wont be needing that. back end will be resilient. if a failure does happen user disconnects and forced to start a new session. not the end of the world.

[Dave_O]

wont be needing that. back end will be resilient. if a failure does happen user disconnects and forced to start a new session. not the end of the world.

 

As long as you (and users) accept that a) all the VMs on that host will need to be re-provisioned each time the host reboots b) The work done in that session will be lost. Having said that how often do your hosts go down? I think the only time ours have gone down is during a power cut or scheduled maintenance.

[funscott]

power outage isnt an issue as we had a planned outage which lasted 8 hours and our UPS still had plenty left before we had to think about shutting down any servers. session work lost would be very little as most users save to the san so only open docs would be lost.

[Dave_O]

power outage isnt an issue as we had a planned outage which lasted 8 hours and our UPS still had plenty left before we had to think about shutting down any servers. session work lost would be very little as most users save to the san so only open docs would be lost.

 

Crikey Moses! That must be one hell of a UPS. Ours last 30 minutes max. We have a Powerchute script that runs after 4 minutes of no power that shuts down all the VMs.

Edited January 30, 2014 by Dave_O

[superatticman]

Funscott - don't let VDI consume too much of the SAN IOPs (hence the reason for putting in local storage in our solution). Having said that ILIO should reduce the IOPs required by a large amount. We found that shutting down all W7 VMs reduced IOPs on the SAN by 4000 (as reported by the V7000).

 

Yes good point and another reason why VDI hasn't been overly popular amongst support staff here. We more or less had to buy in a new SAN to cope with the extra strain that all those VM's put on it. Two classes were using photoshop after the original install and we saw a decrease in overall network performance. Once VDI was throttled somewhat to ensure the stability of the rest, its usability became less attractive and users complained about the performance in big hitting applications. These ran far smoother on even a 3 year old PC.

 

However, another brand new and faster SAN later, it does seem to be up to a reasonable speed.

[funscott]

Thought I would add a little update.

 

Running Hyperv on 2012r2 datacentre with 2012 standard r2 hosting scvmm 2012 r2 (sql 2012 r2) on a R910. this is running xendesktop 7.1 and i have a windows 7 pro 64bit guest vm (2gb 2cpu). at the moment this is hosted on our SAN and averaging 1600 iops from the guest vm (the san isnt used for vdi mainly storage) and the client device is a xenith pro 2 (dell wyse). where to start

 

we are unable to test atlantis ilio diskless at the moment as their 2012 version isnt avaiable (fingers crossed should get a copy soon)

 

however had plenty of time to play about with the zero client and have the following findings

 

good points

setup fairly simple

bootup time from cold around 5 seconds when on standby 3 seconds.

we have also found normal domain logins (before using citrix profile managment) to be far faster than logging onto a production desktop (even with a ssd disk).

 

bad points

 

no flash redirect (no zero client supports this)

youtube etc very watchable in normal / second screen size (wouldnt know it was not using gpu to render). full screen is unacceptable

dell wyse support. one of the main reasons i would not buy this device in bulk. will not even tell you what the latest firmware version is without a support contract (do give 90 days software downlaod if you register the device) im not the only one bitching about their aftersales..

 

 

 

waiting on delivery of a trial axel client (will get back to you mat with the results)

 

we have also tested the web reciever which works very well and can see it being very good for users who have their own devices (in the future)

 

 

so where does this leave us?

 

very interested in the ilio software, dave will probably have more to say about this as hes got a vmware version which he is testing and seeing good gains in performance. the main drawback for us is the lack of flash redirect on the zero cleint which works great for everything else we are looking for. so the way forward is probably going to be to put xendesktop on hold / use as remote access until nvidia vgpu grid becomes available (new tech very limited devices supported at the moment) but will be the future of vdi installs.

Edited February 11, 2014 by funscott

[glennda]

Thought I would add a little update.

 

Running Hyperv on 2012r2 datacentre with 2012 standard r2 hosting scvmm 2012 r2 (sql 2012 r2) on a R910. this is running xendesktop 7.1 and i have a windows 7 pro 64bit guest vm (2gb 2cpu). at the moment this is hosted on our SAN and averaging 1600 iops from the guest vm (the san isnt used for vdi mainly storage) and the client device is a xenith pro 2 (dell wyse). where to start

 

I would say that is a fair bit of iops for that small amount of things running.

 

With regards to Atlantis there is another called pernixdata which i have heard very good things about.

[Dave_O]

Running 50 VMs on a Dell R720 256Gb memory 2 x 8 core 2GHz processors using 6 x 146Gb 15K SAS drives RAID 10 for snapcones. ESX1 5.0 VMware View Premium - 35 Wyse V10Ls internally 15 staff VM available after hours. Atlantis ILIO diskless (in memory). Internally the V10Ls don't support PCOIP (tried a P25 with PCOIP and it works well) so are RDP. Performance reported and observed is good. Staff report that external access (using the default PCOIP) is good ie quick browser response, can play youtube videos etc without being choppy. IOPs on a VM (using IOMeter) are 900. This is an average of 3 runs on different machines (run when 20 VMs in use) using "default". Login times are roughly the same as a desktop ie 30-45 seconds (roaming profile, no profile on machine and performed when 20 VMs in use).

 

Overall I am impressed with Atlantis ILIO and the performance gains achieved with this technology. It's early door (only day 2 in anger) yet so I will keep you posted but the density you can achieve on a single server (the spec above can support up to 80VMs with little or no loss of performance) is impressive and cost effective. It has the added advantage of being able to scale easily and has no impact or necessity for a SAN.

 

This may be a game changer for me but ask me again in a couple of weeks.

[Paid_Peanuts]

so where does this leave us?

 

very interested in the ilio software, dave will probably have more to say about this as hes got a vmware version which he is testing and seeing good gains in performance. the main drawback for us is the lack of flash redirect on the zero cleint which works great for everything else we are looking for. so the way forward is probably going to be to put xendesktop on hold / use as remote access until nvidia vgpu grid becomes available (new tech very limited devices supported at the moment) but will be the future of vdi installs.

 

funscott - do you have any further update on your POC? What are your thoughts and feelings on the technology now you have used it for a few months? Will you be pursuing this on a broader scale?