Making Virtual Desktop for 1000 users

[kamolah]

I am new for virtual desktop technologie. So for practical work at school, I should create some virtual desktop for 100 users. For those 100 users, should I create 100 virtuals machines also? If not how?

Please help me!

[dquintana]

Wellcome Kamolah,

Wich OS you need virtualize?, and how are the requirements of each vm (cpu,mem,disk)

You can male a default template, then with virtual center o the view, make the others vms using this temaplate and customize it with the integrated sysprep tools in vcenter.

Other method is using view + composer, and you make "delta" files form one template vm, but its not recomend to use more than 64 vms for each composer master template.

In you case, clone from template maybe the faster option.

Regards

____________________________

Ing. Diego Quintana

VCP-VAC-VTSP-VSP

Wetcom Group

[http://feeds.feedburner.com/_{r/WetcomGroup/}6/1]

[kamolah]

Thank for your quick response dquintana. The OS which i'll virtualize is Windows XP and Vista. According to you, create a template from one virtual machine is the best for my problem. Have a tuto for that, cuz I am a beginner.

The virtual machine config is: 1 CPU, mem size 1 Gb , disk spac 10 Gb for each user.

And, How I configure the View Manager for deploying the virtual desktop for each user?

Thank for your help.

[acampos]

since you are new you will want to check out the many resources we have at the following link

http://www.vmware.com/products/view/resources.html

check out the Windows XP Deployment Guide

Another well done document is the

View Manager Deployment Guide

http://vmware.com/files/pdf/view-manager-deployment-guide.pdf

Hope that helps

Alex

[Lee_Collison]

The front end design can be fairly simple compared to your backend disk IO requirements. You should analize your applications and the best practice is to run a Proof of Concept (POC) of about 20 desktops utilizing your preferred hardware and software.

Some additional questions that may help:

Are these 100 users all going to be accessing the desktops at the same time?

Have you thought about how large your LUNS will be?

How many disk and what type of disk and RAID groups are planning on deploying?

Also with the later releases of View 3.1.* VMware states that you can have 256 linked clones per master image (and this is not a set in stone number).

[kamolah]

Hi,

Yes, Lee. These 100 users are going to be accessing the desktop at the same time. For the hardware ressource, I already have the appropriate configuration(SAN for the storage).

One question: is it possible to have many Virtual Desktop from one virtual machine?

The linked clones, I'm not sure for this solution because if the master goes wrong everybody lives at the panic!

Thank for the help!

[Lee_Collison]

To be honest I really like the VDI solution, but was not sold on this about a year and half ago because I was a Terminal Server/Citrix guy. As in either one of these technologies you are putting your desktop infrastructure in a single basket, but depending on your needs this is a great risk with great rewards because you as an IT Manager/Support person you can gain alot of benefits such as:

Centralized desktop management

Complete desktop control (I love the revert to snapshot technology)

Users have the same desktop in the office as they do at home

Thin Client at home and on the road (Such as Wyse X90LE) so no data is compromised if a work laptop or computer is lost or stolen

Less trips to the end users desktop to troubleshoot

Updates are applied at one spot

Robust deployment capabilities

Easy fallback steps

When you deploy the linked clone technology you are using the Snapshot feature within VMware. So if you deploy a new snapshot that causes a wide spread issue, all you do is revert back to an older snapshot by either Re-Composing the Persistent Desktops or Deploying new Pools for Non-Persistent desktops. Non-Persistent desktops do not allow for you to Re-Compose since they are not assigned to a user.

I hope this helps.

Lee

[sixpockets]

Hi,

This is Abhinav Joshi, one of the VDI Architects at NetApp, responsible for developing best practices and Reference Architectures for VMware View on NetApp. Here are few Reference Architectures we did jointly with VMware that provide step by step instructions on how you setup a POC or production VMware View environment.

http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualization/2009/06/new-cisco-vmware-netapp-vdi-design-guide-tr3770.html

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/resources/VMware_View_on_NetApp_Unified_Storage.pdf

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10051

Finally, here is the best practices guide that has storage sizing guidelines for View.

http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3705.pdf

I am sure your storage vendor would have similar documents.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Abhinav Joshi

http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualization/