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jdre2134
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New View Deployment

Hi the company I work for is getting ready to do a small view deployment, maybe around 40-45 desktops concurrently.  Do you see an obvious issues with the following equipment or anything I should be looking at?  We are going to be running Win7 with probably 3GB of RAM and 2vcpu each, really just standard workstation setups and nothing too demanding for the most part. 

Hosts (x2):

Dell R620

2 - 6 core Xeon E5-2620 @ 2GHZ

128GB RAM

Additional 2 port NIC

SAN:

Equallogic PS4100XV

24 146GB 15k SAS, Raid10

Dual Controllers

SAN Switches:

2 Dell PowerConnect 6224

Thanks!

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tacticsbaby
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Your hardware:

Hosts (x2):

Dell R620

2 - 6 core Xeon E5-2620 @ 2GHZ

128GB RAM

Additional 2 port NIC

From a server standpoint things look good. Each server has 128GB of RAM and the CPUs should be fine. It really depends on the workload your "40-50" users generate. Are they power users? What kind of apps are they using? You may also wish to consider starting with a smaller amount of memory for each desktop. Some in this forum have reported good results with 1 GB of memory. We had good performance with 2 GB if memory in our deployments. Getting the memory size right will give your cluster more breathing room. Do you really need to give each VM 2 vCPUs?

SAN:

Equallogic PS4100XV

24 146GB 15k SAS, Raid10

Dual Controllers

You should do some calculations to see how many IOPS you will need from your storage in order to provide a good user experience. Are you going to use linked-clones? If so then you should take a closer look at your storage. In our case we also used an Eguallogic SAN. Ours was a hybrid array with half SSDs and half 15K SAS drives. Auto-tiering was enabled as well. This was one heck of a SAN. Simple to configure, easy to use and the performance was great. I don't know about the version you have, but I would imagine that it should work for your needs. Again, you will need to do some math and some testing to see what works for you.

SAN Switches:

2 Dell PowerConnect 6224

We used the same switches and had no problems. You may wish to experiment with jumbo frames. In my case, jumbo frames improved my provisioning of linked-clone pools.

Good luck with your implementation. It will be a challenging and fun experience. You should spend some time figuring out what level of performance your users will need and what resources you are willing and able to provide. I also noticed that you did not mention anything about your endpoint devices. What kind of client will you use? A repurposed PC? A thin client of some kind? Take some time to find what works for you and what you and your user like. We really liked the Wyse P20. This should not be taken as the gospel but it is a good start: http://myvirtualcloud.net/?page_id=1076

There are also many other related articles in that link that can help. Please let everyone know how your project goes and good luck!

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tacticsbaby
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Your hardware:

Hosts (x2):

Dell R620

2 - 6 core Xeon E5-2620 @ 2GHZ

128GB RAM

Additional 2 port NIC

From a server standpoint things look good. Each server has 128GB of RAM and the CPUs should be fine. It really depends on the workload your "40-50" users generate. Are they power users? What kind of apps are they using? You may also wish to consider starting with a smaller amount of memory for each desktop. Some in this forum have reported good results with 1 GB of memory. We had good performance with 2 GB if memory in our deployments. Getting the memory size right will give your cluster more breathing room. Do you really need to give each VM 2 vCPUs?

SAN:

Equallogic PS4100XV

24 146GB 15k SAS, Raid10

Dual Controllers

You should do some calculations to see how many IOPS you will need from your storage in order to provide a good user experience. Are you going to use linked-clones? If so then you should take a closer look at your storage. In our case we also used an Eguallogic SAN. Ours was a hybrid array with half SSDs and half 15K SAS drives. Auto-tiering was enabled as well. This was one heck of a SAN. Simple to configure, easy to use and the performance was great. I don't know about the version you have, but I would imagine that it should work for your needs. Again, you will need to do some math and some testing to see what works for you.

SAN Switches:

2 Dell PowerConnect 6224

We used the same switches and had no problems. You may wish to experiment with jumbo frames. In my case, jumbo frames improved my provisioning of linked-clone pools.

Good luck with your implementation. It will be a challenging and fun experience. You should spend some time figuring out what level of performance your users will need and what resources you are willing and able to provide. I also noticed that you did not mention anything about your endpoint devices. What kind of client will you use? A repurposed PC? A thin client of some kind? Take some time to find what works for you and what you and your user like. We really liked the Wyse P20. This should not be taken as the gospel but it is a good start: http://myvirtualcloud.net/?page_id=1076

There are also many other related articles in that link that can help. Please let everyone know how your project goes and good luck!

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jdre2134
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Thanks for the reply, very much appreciated. 

Servers:

To answer your questions.  We may have about 5 power users total.  Most people are really just working with MS office and Lotus Notes.  Some of the people who work in our communications department use Photoshop and a few other specialized applications, but nothing that should be too intensive.  My initial thought was to go with 2GB (that is what we did our pilot at) and I believe we will probably start at that point, thanks for the recommendation.  Our consultants wanted to go with 3GB, we just wasn't sure it was truly necassary, but we do have room to add more if we need to.  I am not sure that we need to do 2 vCPUs, and I might just start out a 1 and see if we need to up it or not.

SAN:

We have ran some performance monitoring tests on our network, and believe we will be in the range that we can use this SAN.  I am, however, going to go over the numbers again to be absolutely sure.  Yes, we will be using linked Clones.  We looked at hybrid SANs and they are really what I would want in the future if we up our deployment (we may add a couple more locations down the line but nothing is set in stone) unfortunately for now, we are on a budget and only have to worry about our company.  We are also a non-profit, so very little growth is anticipated.  The only other question I had in regards to the SAN we are looking at is that it only has 2-1Gbe ports on each controller, is this something I should be concerned about or would that be more than sufficient? Which model SAN did you go with then? 

We are doing a mix of thin clients (wyse Z90S7) and repurposing old pc's.  I would like to use zero clients in the future, but my manager wants to test them before we go on a full blown deployment with them. 

Thanks for all the information again and I will be sure to let everyone know how it goes. 

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tacticsbaby
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We used a PS series Equallogic SAN. We had rougly the same SAN/Network configuration as you and it worked fine for us. I would just recommed that you experiment with Jumbo frames. At least that is what the Dell storage engineers recommened to us for improving performance of linked clone pool provisioning. I forget the exact model number of our Equallogic, but as I said half of it's drives were SSD. Our SAN was optimized for VDI and was specced for us with the assistance of Dell. As for you thin clients, good luck there. You should take a look at your requirements when making that decision. Will you be using smart cards or other USB peripherals? By the way, if these posts are helpful then please award points. Thanks in advance.

jdre2134
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Thanks, I will look into that.  No smart cards, just pretty much usb printers on some of our manager's desks.  You have been of great help, thank you very much!

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tacticsbaby
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Always glad to help. Just rember to take your time with this if you can. In our main implementations we found many issues that we never considered before we started the project. Microsoft licensing being one of the biggest and most complicated pieces. Since you mention that you will be using USB printers for some of your users I would recommend that you experiment with this stuff well  before you even try to deploy. We found many unexpected results with some of the USB devices we used. Otherwise things went well for us. Just make sure to do as much testing as you can. Also, you should look into a tool called RAWC 1.2 from VMware or there is another tool from Liquid Labs (I forget the name). These tools will help you get an idea of how much your infrastructure can take so that you will be able to get an idea of your average user experience. I also recommend that you take some time with working on optimizing your base WIndows 7 image for best VDI performance. Fortunately VMware published a nice paper on this: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-View-OptimizationGuideWindows7-EN.pdf

VMware recommends that you use the MDT2010 (Microsoft Deployment Tool - for Windows OS building and deployment) to build your image. I found that once you get the hang of this tool it can easily help you build optimized WIn7 images. VMware gives you a file called "ts.xml" to do the OS customizations/optimizations. If you don't want to use MDT and wish to do something fast and simple they include a script that does much the same as MDT2010. I recommend that you consider using MDT because once you get it setup you will then have a nice infrastructure for building customized Win7 images quickly and cleanly. This helped us a great deal because the learning curve for WIn7 was steep for us, as we had mostly WinXP skillsets in our environment. One thing I learned is that the fastest way to have grief with Win7 deployment is to treat it like XP. If you will notice, many of the common management tasks relating to user profiles in Windows XP were never blessed by Microsoft for XP and they are now even harder to do in WIndows7 for good reason. For example:

Suppose you want to create a default user profile that every user will get. If you used the old Windows XP method you would just create a user profile and configure it as you like and then copy it to the default user profile. This does not work with Win7. By the way, if you have ever seen a strange problem in MS deployments where users login to Outlook/Exchange yet get bombarded with constant requests to login to Exchange. This problem usually comes from copying the default user profile and is one of many reasons MS says not to do this. I any case, good luck with your deployment. I strongly recommend that you take the time to read the Win7 Optimization guide closely. It is worth it.

jdre2134
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Thanks, again.  I know there will be challenges, and I believe we have a few devices floating out there that may present a problem or two, but I am confident we can work through it.  I have already discussed it with my Manager and we are going to do the whole deployment in stages.  The last thing I want to do is try and rush things and have everything crash and burn and then suddenly look like we spent a lot of money for a solution that will not work.  It is funny when you mention and iPad being a possibility in the future and they are all about that. We haven't been able to use Tablets in the past because we use some specialized programs that will not run on them.  I actually have a spare USB printer that I will test and see how that goes too.  I will most definitely check out those tools too. 

I have actually already read through the guide and do currently have an optimized image, although there are a few things I want to change on it before it goes into production.  I am going to look at MDT2010 now too, no experience with it, but it sounds like it should help.  All the information you have provided has been very helpful, thank you for that.

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tacticsbaby
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We had clients that wanted to us iPads, but like you we could not do it because of software problems and data security concerns. One or the shining points in our deployment was the deployment of a security server that we used to deliver Win7 desktops to iPads. This worked awesome for us. It really does give me a little laugh seeing a sharp crisp Windows 7 desktop being displayed on an iPad. I bet everytime this happens Bill Gates eats a kitten :smileylaugh:

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