mac_shinobi Posted June 2, 2011 Posted June 2, 2011 Would love to have your budget If your still intrested I'm posting a video on youtube in about an hour which is from our presentation yesterday about the Kaviza tech - dosn't cover SSDs though If there is one that covers SSD's I would be interested to see, all I can keep thinking of is the Samsung SSD youtube video with 24 RAID'ed SSD's with the 2gbps read With SATA 3 - I presume you would only need 4 SSD's to get the 2gbps read performance assuming you had a decent RAID card that supported 6gbps SAS with the said sas to sata cables?
jamesfed Posted June 2, 2011 Posted June 2, 2011 If there is one that covers SSD's I would be interested to see, all I can keep thinking of is the Samsung SSD youtube video with 24 RAID'ed SSD's with the 2gbps read With SATA 3 - I presume you would only need 4 SSD's to get the 2gbps read performance assuming you had a decent RAID card that supported 6gbps SAS with the said sas to sata cables? Sorry don't have one about SSDs (yet at least!) What if I were to put you in contact with Nigel @Kaviza here in the UK - he knows his stuff and has been keenly following SSDs on virtual desktops for a while. 1
localzuk Posted June 2, 2011 Author Posted June 2, 2011 Would love to have your budget If your still intrested I'm posting a video on youtube in about an hour which is from our presentation yesterday about the Kaviza tech - dosn't cover SSDs though Well, it'd either be that or replacing suites of computers. And we buy all in one computers (due to massively constrained space). So 35 x £700 every 4 - 5 years like the moment...
mac_shinobi Posted June 2, 2011 Posted June 2, 2011 Well, it'd either be that or replacing suites of computers. And we buy all in one computers (due to massively constrained space). So 35 x £700 every 4 - 5 years like the moment... 35 computers would only be one large room or one room and a few spares ?
mac_shinobi Posted June 2, 2011 Posted June 2, 2011 Sorry don't have one about SSDs (yet at least!) What if I were to put you in contact with Nigel @Kaviza here in the UK - he knows his stuff and has been keenly following SSDs on virtual desktops for a while. That would be great Thanks
localzuk Posted June 3, 2011 Author Posted June 3, 2011 35 computers would only be one large room or one room and a few spares ? Yup, that'd be a single one of our ICT suites. So, my rough plan would be to move to VDI for tha majority of machines, maybe keeping one full-fat suite around for the super intensive stuff. I'm also now going to look at rough ideas of cost to do it with the RemoteFX stuff too. To see how that figures into things.
localzuk Posted June 3, 2011 Author Posted June 3, 2011 Ok. RemoteFX = Stupidly expensive. Basically, if you throw in the desire to have RemoteFX, you end up with needing a £2k graphics card for every 20 machines. And as servers can only support 1 or 2 of them, you end up needing racks of servers to go with it. So, to support about 160 clients, you'd need 8 HP DL370 G6's with FX5800 cards. Coming to around £120k or so. Or without RemoteFX, you can drop that down to about £10k. Hmm!!
Guest Guest Posted June 3, 2011 Posted June 3, 2011 How much writing are you going to be doing on these disks? afaik consumer drives are not really up to the sort of write amounts a server would put on it. Have you looked at the costs of the enterprise class SSDs? Although if you are happy replacing them every 3 years you may end up being fine.
localzuk Posted June 3, 2011 Author Posted June 3, 2011 How much writing are you going to be doing on these disks? afaik consumer drives are not really up to the sort of write amounts a server would put on it. Have you looked at the costs of the enterprise class SSDs? Although if you are happy replacing them every 3 years you may end up being fine. As I said, the replacement cycle would be about 3 years anyway. So, it wouldn't be a huge issue. Also, the write demands of them would not be as high as you'd think, due to it being spread across 6 of them etc...
gshaw Posted June 3, 2011 Posted June 3, 2011 Ok. RemoteFX = Stupidly expensive. Basically, if you throw in the desire to have RemoteFX, you end up with needing a £2k graphics card for every 20 machines. And as servers can only support 1 or 2 of them, you end up needing racks of servers to go with it. So, to support about 160 clients, you'd need 8 HP DL370 G6's with FX5800 cards. Coming to around £120k or so. Or without RemoteFX, you can drop that down to about £10k. Hmm!! But have naff graphics performance on the clients? Or is there some other way of getting around it? Have to say I was very impressed with the Citrix HDX graphics performance at the last demo I saw, can RemoteFX work that well as software-only given sufficient CPU horsepower?
localzuk Posted June 3, 2011 Author Posted June 3, 2011 But have naff graphics performance on the clients? Or is there some other way of getting around it? Have to say I was very impressed with the Citrix HDX graphics performance at the last demo I saw, can RemoteFX work that well as software-only given sufficient CPU horsepower? Well, that works out at £700 a machine, so the other option is... using full machines. The idea of VDI is supposed to reduce TCO, but with RemoteFX it increases it dramatically. The other option is the HDX stuff, yes, but that is also expensive in terms of licensing.
gshaw Posted June 3, 2011 Posted June 3, 2011 Indeed, this is where VDI seems to fall down a bit still... you either drop the client experience or take the hit in the pocket In a multimedia-rich world I don't think I could do the first one (might as well stick with Terminal Services for anyone who doesn't need multimedia?) and the 2nd one isn't great either. There's some great advantages management-wise to VDI but I'm not sure if that's enough to make up for the other issues...
localzuk Posted June 3, 2011 Author Posted June 3, 2011 I think it all needs work doing before it can become feasible for many places to look at. I may see what the cost of Citrix XenDesktop is lately to compare things. And maybe VMWare's offering.
localzuk Posted June 7, 2011 Author Posted June 7, 2011 Ok, bringing this topic back up again. If I were to go down the XenDesktop VDI route, I wouldn't need so many SSDs would I? What sort of storage capacities would I be looking at for 160 desktops running at once?
jamesfed Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 Ok, bringing this topic back up again. If I were to go down the XenDesktop VDI route, I wouldn't need so many SSDs would I? What sort of storage capacities would I be looking at for 160 desktops running at once? With most VDI setups you just need enough storage to store the 'master/golden image' and then each desktop from there on in links back to that master image and only records the differances in a seprate file - this way instead of having 20 Windows XP VMs consuming 20GB each you would have one single 20Gb image shared out between the 20 desktops with a small ammount of storage (say another 20Gb) used to storage the differances in each VM (things like local profiles/computer account names ect). Our VDI setup only uses 4x 72GB SAS drives and thats for 20 VMs - we could easily expand up to 80 with the way storage is being used at the moment but the only bottle neck is the speed of the drives. 1
localzuk Posted June 7, 2011 Author Posted June 7, 2011 So something like 1 of these would do in terms of space? 240GB OCZ RevoDrive X2 SSD Solid State Disk PCI-Express for Desktops and Workstations (read 740MB/sec - write 720MB/sec)
jamesfed Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 So something like 1 of these would do in terms of space? 240GB OCZ RevoDrive X2 SSD Solid State Disk PCI-Express for Desktops and Workstations (read 740MB/sec - write 720MB/sec) Capacity wise that would be fine - the only thing is will the servers mobo support it and also you need to think about does XenServer support it? Personally I would love to get something like this for our next VDI project the only thing until someone does it and posts a blog post about it I'm a little too reluctant to deploy something like this in a production environment. 1
localzuk Posted June 7, 2011 Author Posted June 7, 2011 Yeah, I don't know if I'd go down the PCIe route actually. SATA 6G looks more appetising.
jamesfed Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 Yeah, I don't know if I'd go down the PCIe route actually. SATA 6G looks more appetising. It sure does - you can get OCZ drives with SAS 6G as well now.
gshaw Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 With most VDI setups you just need enough storage to store the 'master/golden image' and then each desktop from there on in links back to that master image and only records the differances in a seprate file - this way instead of having 20 Windows XP VMs consuming 20GB each you would have one single 20Gb image shared out between the 20 desktops with a small ammount of storage (say another 20Gb) used to storage the differances in each VM (things like local profiles/computer account names ect). Our VDI setup only uses 4x 72GB SAS drives and thats for 20 VMs - we could easily expand up to 80 with the way storage is being used at the moment but the only bottle neck is the speed of the drives. Indeed, XenDesktop is clever with the provisioning but as you say the storage becomes the bottleneck. You're then either at the point of SANs with flash acceleration or a single server with local storage, not something I'd like take a chance on if all my clients were depending on it... 1
localzuk Posted June 7, 2011 Author Posted June 7, 2011 Indeed, XenDesktop is clever with the provisioning but as you say the storage becomes the bottleneck. You're then either at the point of SANs with flash acceleration or a single server with local storage, not something I'd like take a chance on if all my clients were depending on it... Considering the costs involved here, a server with 144GB of RAM and 2x SSDs capable of supporting VDI would come to around £5k. So, for £10k, you could easily have 2, with double the capacity required. So, if one died, your remaining one would have the space to run everything you need anyway.
jamesfed Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 Indeed, XenDesktop is clever with the provisioning but as you say the storage becomes the bottleneck. You're then either at the point of SANs with flash acceleration or a single server with local storage, not something I'd like take a chance on if all my clients were depending on it... Our 1Gb Flash Back cache does a grand job for keeping things ticking over nicely Next step will be to fill the server with a full stack of HDDs when we expand our Virtual Desktop estate.
jamesfed Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 Considering the costs involved here, a server with 144GB of RAM and 2x SSDs capable of supporting VDI would come to around £5k. So, for £10k, you could easily have 2, with double the capacity required. So, if one died, your remaining one would have the space to run everything you need anyway. I know I've said it before but if you want to go local storage take a look at Kaviza - its made for local storage runs on XenServer and uses Citrix HDX. It keeps things simple as well because you don't need a seperate connection broker.
Soulfish Posted June 7, 2011 Posted June 7, 2011 If you're rolling your own storage server using comodity parts I'd probably opt for a minimum of 4 SSDs in a Raid-10 array. I'd give a guess at a IOPs utilisation of 1,000 -2,000 for that many desktops asuming all users logged in and doing things. Boot-up IOPs would be much higher (probably around 10,000 - 15,000) but can be managed by booting up desktops over a period of an hour at the start of the day/peak time. http://jimmoyle.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/05/Windows_7_IOPS_for_VDI_a_Deep_Dive_1_0.pdf is a good read for some W7 specific information. Estimate IOPS for Virtual Desktops » ocb - Citrix Community and Deploying XenDesktop without a SAN » ocb - Citrix Community are also some good documents/blogs to read on deploy XenDesktop and IOP requirement planning. The last link is focused on deploying XenDesktop without a SAN and just what you'd need to do that. One other option is to use XenServers intellicache feature with XenDesktop. See XenDesktop 5 with IntelliCache cuts VDI storage costs in half » ocb - Citrix Community for more infomation. Wouldn't necessarily need SSDs then - either for the SAN or for the local disks. 1
localzuk Posted June 7, 2011 Author Posted June 7, 2011 I know I've said it before but if you want to go local storage take a look at Kaviza - its made for local storage runs on XenServer and uses Citrix HDX. It keeps things simple as well because you don't need a seperate connection broker. Going from your email though, it seems to cost about 3x as much as XenDesktop. Meaning 160 clients go from about £5k in licenses to £15k in licenses.
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now