Hyper-V for student labs

[BinaryBraz]

I work for a small college with multiple physical lab spaces. Every 3 to 4 years we purchase new desktops for the labs (based on when the warranty runs out). Do to the high cost of this and the cost and complexity of management we have been looking into virtualizing the labs and installing all in one zero clients. So far I have successfully built a test lab using VMware. It automatically builds a pool of VDs from a snapshot and allows me to schedule maintenance on them. From what I have figured out the cost of going with VMware including the zero clients and all, would be slightly higher than replacing all the systems every 4 years. With the cost dropping as time goes on. This does not take into account the amount we will save in licensing for lab management that we will no longer need (example, Deep Freeze).

 

But, looking at our site licensing with Microsoft it would be cheaper to use Hyper-V. Only one problem, what took me only a week to get up and running with VMware, is taking me much longer with Hyper-V. At this point I think my mind has gotten tired of the research. So I am going to ask here for some help. I need to know is it even possible to get the same functionality from Hyper-V in this sense? Does anyone know of a tool along the same lines as View Administrator that can automate the process of building, refreshing, redistributing them across volumes, and keep them powered on at all times? Also if any of you have built such an environment with Hyper-V, what has your experience been? So far I am finding it to be much more frustrating.

 

One more note, we also would like students to access the VDs from their tablets and other mobile devices. I have accomplished this with VMware and have not even touched the idea on Hyper-V. I would like to get a fully functional test environment set up for both before picking one over the other. The cost saving of Hyper-V would be wonderful and possibly worth the extra work if we can take advantage of it. Any help, advice, or feed back you may have would be highly appreciated.

[Asgard]

Dell vWorkspace is your answer. We have been running it since 2009, before Dell bought Quest - 2 years ago we moved it from vmware to hyper-v

 

I'll happily show you our system - we use it for remote access, BYOD and 60 internal Wyse clients

 

We have a Dell c6220 box (4 node), each node has 256gb ram and it's all on SSD disks - and 10gb using hyper-v 2012 r2

 

We have VDIs that have a minimum of 4gb per VDI. It has a minimum of 100 provisioned across the 4 boxes but will auto expand as it needs to

 

It now uses html5 client so you can use it without a plugin - we have it running in Chromebook's

 

John Paul

Edited March 19, 2015 by Asgard

[Ric_]

From what you describe, do you even need to use VDI rather than a more traditional shared desktop? A standard shared desktop setup is much easier to configure and you can usually get more users on a machine. Of course, some software is rubbish and will only work on VDI... or maybe you require high end graphics processing and wotnot. There are some good guides out there for both shared desktop and VDI on Hyper-V. A quick Google turned this video up

for instance.

 

I don't know how well the Microsoft implementation works on random devices (iPads, Chromebooks, ) but I know that Citrix XenDesktop has the best compatibility across platforms (as in it will work on anything - native Receiver for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Linux, ChromeOS and the HTML5 client for everything else) and is fractionally cheaper than VMware Horizon so, it that is a consideration, you may want to contact a reseller to get a trial license.

[BinaryBraz]

Dell vWorkspace is your answer. We have been running it since 2009, before Dell bought Quest - 2 years ago we moved it from vmware to hyper-v

 

I'll happily show you our system - we use it for remote access, BYOD and 60 internal Wyse clients

 

We have a Dell c6220 box (4 node), each node has 256gb ram and it's all on SSD disks - and 10gb using hyper-v 2012 r2

 

We have VDIs that have a minimum of 4gb per VDI. It has a minimum of 100 provisioned across the 4 boxes but will auto expand as it needs to

 

It now uses html5 client so you can use it without a plugin - we have it running in Chromebook's

 

John Paul

 

I forgot all about vWorkspace. We are a Dell house after all, so that will be worth playing with. Chromebooks are also something we want to support with this system, as students seem to be buying them like mad. We expect to deploy around 300 Dell Wyse all in ones. These have been the best we have tested so far. Plus we want an additional 100 or so for students to access from tablets and Chromebooks. But this is a 4 year plan of replacing labs as the warranty runs out. I would love to do SSDs but they seem out of our price rang. Did you find a trick for lowering storage cost?

[BinaryBraz]

From what you describe, do you even need to use VDI rather than a more traditional shared desktop? A standard shared desktop setup is much easier to configure and you can usually get more users on a machine. Of course, some software is rubbish and will only work on VDI... or maybe you require high end graphics processing and wotnot. There are some good guides out there for both shared desktop and VDI on Hyper-V. A quick Google turned this video up

for instance.

 

I don't know how well the Microsoft implementation works on random devices (iPads, Chromebooks, Dos_Box[/u]>) but I know that Citrix XenDesktop has the best compatibility across platforms (as in it will work on anything - native Receiver for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Linux, ChromeOS and the HTML5 client for everything else) and is fractionally cheaper than VMware Horizon so, it that is a consideration, you may want to contact a reseller to get a trial license.

 

We looked into Shared desktops when we first started this project. But we found a few of our main teaching applications would not run on them even with help from the vendor. So we thought in the long run VDI would keep us as close to a normal user environment as possible.

[fiza]

Dell vWorkspace is your answer. We have been running it since 2009, before Dell bought Quest - 2 years ago we moved it from vmware to hyper-v

 

I'll happily show you our system - we use it for remote access, BYOD and 60 internal Wyse clients

 

We have a Dell c6220 box (4 node), each node has 256gb ram and it's all on SSD disks - and 10gb using hyper-v 2012 r2

 

We have VDIs that have a minimum of 4gb per VDI. It has a minimum of 100 provisioned across the 4 boxes but will auto expand as it needs to

 

It now uses html5 client so you can use it without a plugin - we have it running in Chromebook's

 

John Paul

 

How much did that setup cost you?

[Asgard]

I forgot all about vWorkspace. We are a Dell house after all, so that will be worth playing with. Chromebooks are also something we want to support with this system, as students seem to be buying them like mad. We expect to deploy around 300 Dell Wyse all in ones. These have been the best we have tested so far. Plus we want an additional 100 or so for students to access from tablets and Chromebooks. But this is a 4 year plan of replacing labs as the warranty runs out. I would love to do SSDs but they seem out of our price rang. Did you find a trick for lowering storage cost?

 

Each of the C6220 nodes are allocated 3 SSD disks

 

SSD A - Standard Dell SSD (Dell OEM LCS-256M6S) -for the OS alone (Sever 2012 R2 Datacenter with Hyper-V 2012 R2)

SSD B & C - Intel S7300 SSD

 

Each host therefore has 3 drives, we split the VDI's across the remaining two SSD's in each node.

 

 

On the D drive we have a copy of the Gold Image (vWorkspace calls it HyperCache) - basically one gold image held centrally (and you only update one gold image), but its copies it to each host for local speed, etc. and 8 VDIs in fact..

 

 

On the E drive we have 20 VDIs example of a VDI is

 

 

its a fraction of the main gold image, some are 4gb some are 8GB, it all depends on whether they are persistent desktops etc... but on average they are 6GB

 

Our Gold VDI Image is 32GB

 

The system is set to make sure that we have a minimum of 150 VDIs across the 4 boxes and auto-provision another 20 as soon as we hit 140 concurrent connections (which we only do at around exam time etc) - it can provision and fully setup 10 VDIs in less than 5 minutes.

 

The beauty of it being across 4 nodes and 8 disks in total - if we have a hardware failure on one node the others will happily carry one, obviously if the entire C6220 chasis had an issue id have a bigger issue, but again its covered by a hardware warranty. Same, if one of the SSDs failed in any of the nodes, were losing at maximum 50 VDI's but we can then increase the other 3 by this number to accommodate. or just swap out the SSD and reprovision 50 in about 10 minutes

Edited March 20, 2015 by Asgard

[Asgard]

How much did that setup cost you?

 

Er hard one to put a number too as we have had vWorkspace since 2009, but

 

Software

you can put your concurrent user count here (use the per access device);

 

https://shop.software.dell.com/682/catalog/product.s4687/language.en/currency.GBP/?id=HBXgN7c4S5

 

and I know that's just retail, so you can chew your Dell account rep's ear off to get money off. We have a 200 concurrent user license and pay £800 a year for our support contract with them. But I think we paid about 9K for it when we purchased it.

 

Hardware;

We initially ran it on 4 x Dell 710 that were bought brand new from Dell in 2009 and they cost 15k inc vat, however they were retired in the summer.

 

We bought two C6220 at the same time (in July last year), one was direct from Dell and the other was from ServerSource. Its the serversource one that we use for our VDIs

 

It cost 11.5K ex vat for; a C6220 unit with each node having;

 

2 x Intel E5-2620 2.0ghz

128GB RAM

2 x 300GB 15K SAS Disks

Raid Controller

1 x Dual Port 10gb (Intel X540T)

5yr Professional Support NBD

 

We then bought the SSDs which were about £200 each I think - got a deal buying them.

 

I couldn't justify buying two from Dell, so decided to take a stab at serversource, and their support has been fantastic - one of the nodes had a RAM issue (which co-incidentally happened on our Dell supplied one) and both Dell and Serversource identified it as faulty ram - ServerSource actually had the RAM swapped out before the Dell Engineer had turned up! - dispite them being at least 4 hours away from us.

 

John Paul

Edited March 20, 2015 by Asgard

[Asgard]

@BinaryBraz

 

Send me a PM and I will give you access to a guest login... on one provisio!

 

you login via a chromebook so you can see it really does work without installing anything hahahahaahah - here is a link to my departments (im the head of IT Services here) twitter feed showing it running on a Dell Chromeebook.

 

 

Oh I also have it running on a Dell Wyse Cloud Connect HDMI TV Dongle...

Edited March 20, 2015 by Asgard

[BinaryBraz]

I had no idea they made a dongle! I'll have to look into that as well. Have you tried using it for digital signage? I have contacted our Dell rep, so I will see what they have to offer. Sounds like really good system you have set up. And thank you for the offer. You have been a big help. I am not worried about fail over either. The way I see it, nothing is saved to the systems, and no changes are made. So if a node goes down, the others and take over and build new desktops automatically. Any students working from an affected VM would lose their "work in progress" either way from what I understand. You have been a big help!

[Asgard]

Exactly it's not the end of the world if we lose a few (touch wood since 2009 we haven't had an outage anywhere on our VDI platform)

 

Yeah it's a pretty good setup. The SSDs make a huge difference - logins take about 3 seconds. They take 5 on our full fat client using a 4mb mandatory profile.

 

The dongle is pretty good - except you need a dam software license (£30 per device per year) to be able to use it, which they don't tell you!!

 

With regard to our VDI we average about 80/90 concurrent connections between 5pm and midnight from staff and students logging in from home.

 

If you (or anyone else reading this) are going down this route and pick vworkspace, give me a shout I'll help you set it up. I'll have you up and running (provided you have a gold image) in a couple of hours - I've set it up for two other sixth form colleges near me and will be doing a local high school soon.

Edited March 20, 2015 by Asgard

[jamin100]

I'd be interested how you get logins down to 5 seconds

 

I have a vworkspace solution

2 hosts, 1tb of ssds and 128gb ram in each host. 2 brokers also

 

We have s golden image and desktops take less than 3 minutes to provision but logging on to one of those desktops can take 30 seconds on a wired client and up to a minute on a wireless laptop

[Asgard]

@jamin100

 

For us it's been an ongoing quest (no pun intended) to tweak our VDI setup as the years go on.

 

Our gold image is highly tweaked using a variety of methods; mainly the VWorkspace Desktop Optimizer ( http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/virtualization/vworkspace/b/vworkspace-blog/archive/2011/09/08/the-free-quest-vworkspace-desktop-optimizer ) and reading other manuals on how to tweak gold images for VDI deployments - Citrix have a great guide on tweaking VDIs

And a lot of stuff ripped out using msconfig.

 

Another thing, we dispense with the traditional login script on our VDIs & instead we add a batch file to the "startup" folder in the start menu that in effect runs all the login script stuff (but as it runs after the login) it cuts the login time down.

 

Mapping printers, shared drives etc all done as soon as they login - by the time they scroll up to my computer it's already finished.

 

They run seperate GPOs compared to the rest of our infrastructure. Specific GPO settings tailored to VDIs.

 

When we moved to vWorkspace 8.5 saw logins drop by about a second - by enabling RDP8 in the VDI - it's fine if the end user doesn't use RDP8 but if they do, you get a performance boost.

 

We also found that by NOT having the SSDs that vworkspace uses in any sort of raid setup also helped - there's no need as far as I'm concerned.

 

I suppose it helps that our infrastructure is full 10gb and our mandatory profiles are hosted on servers that have SSDs

Edited March 21, 2015 by Asgard

[jamin100]

Sounds interesting.

I'll defiantly need to look into it further as login times are a pain here

 

I'd also like to get the web gateway working to allow the VDI over the web

 

We are still on version 8 at the minute as the thought of moving to 8.5 and breaking everything is quite daunting

Edited March 21, 2015 by jamin100

[Asgard]

https://desktop.bsfc.ac.uk :-) - logins from home are about 20 seconds.

 

I'd be more than willing to help you move to 8.5 mate. The only pre-requisite for 8.5 -

(If you want to use the HTML5 connector ) is that both your broker and gateway need to be server 2012 and above.

 

So for me I built a new broker and gateway and then just moved the VDIs.

 

100% if you want to upgrade to 8.5 ill help you.

Edited March 21, 2015 by Asgard

[jamin100]

Thanks

I may take you up on that our hosts are 2012r2 as they had to be rebuilt last year but I think both brokers are still 2008r2

 

Plenty of scope to take them to 2012 r2 though

[Asgard]

Our broker and gateway are both virtual boxes running 2012 r2

 

By having them virtualised I got away with the need for two brokers ;-)

[jamin100]

Yeh mine are virtualised too but last year had a massive issue that took us and dell about 2 months to solve and at that point they recommended we separated the database and the broker role into different servers

 

On the database server we installed the broker just incase the main broker died we'd still be able to administer the solution