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eeg3
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Commander

First off, is VDI now VMWare View? Yep.

What have you used and how has your experience been with them? We've been pleased with Wyse's thin clients, particularly their SLES-based units (no hardware PCoIP in these, though). We've also tried HP's thin clients. Wyse is a little pricier, but overall better. The Wyse P20 is a hardware-based PCoIP thin client and I have heard nothing but good things about them.

How about CDROM support? There is no local CD drive support with PCoIP yet. We have to use external drives.

What kind of vDesktop have you made? Do you use 2vCPUs or single CPU VMs? How have they been performing? We start with 1 vCPU and 1GB of RAM, and bump it up if it can be proven it is needed.

Have you put your Virtual Desktops in the same vSphere cluster as your servers? Or do you have separate ESX hosts for just desktops? Nope, we have a separate vCenter/Cluster setup for View. This was primarily driven by the fact 4.1 doesn't work with View, but it is also good practice in general. VMware recommends separating, as well.

I know that Desktops have an entirely different kind of load than servers, I know they create a lot more disk activity, but is it enough that I should have a separate cluster? Storage is THE #1 bottleneck with Virtual Desktops when you scale out. Plan your IOPS needs very carefully; you may start small then everyone wants a virtual desktop. Smiley Happy Lots of tools out there to help you get a good assessment; check out Liquidware Labs' products.

I'd recommend you try out some of Wyse's thin clients. You can get a demo unit and return it if you don't like it. Virtual desktops can be a big undertaking if you want to do it well, good luck!

Blog: http://blog.eeg3.net