White Papers

Sizing and Best Practices for Deploying VMware View 4.5
on VMware vSphere 4.1 with Dell EqualLogic Storage
7
The size of the parent VM image used in our desktop pools was 15GB. We allocated one vCPU and
1GB of memory for each desktop VM. A linked-clone desktop pool was assigned to each ESX cluster.
3.1 Test Infrastructure: Component Design Details
Table 1 below provides an overview of the components used to build our test configuration.
Component Purpose / Usage
Servers
3 x Dell PowerEdge M610 Blade Servers:
• 2 x Quad Core Intel Xeon E5620
• 2.40 GHz CPUs and 96GB of Memory
• Broadcom 5709 quad-port 1GbE mezzanine
card
VMware ESX 4.1 Infrastructure Cluster (vCenter Server,
domain Controllers, View Connection Manager, etc.)
13 x Dell PowerEdge M610 Blade Servers:
• 2 x Six Core Intel Xeon X5680
• 3.33 GHz CPUs and 96GB of Memory
• Broadcom 5709 quad-port 1GbE mezzanine
card
VMware ESX 4.1 View Client VM Clusters (one 8 host cluster
and one 5 host cluster)
Storage Arrays
1 x EqualLogic PS6000XVS
• 8 x 450GB 15K rpm SAS
• 8 x 100GB SSD
1 x EqualLogic PS6000XV
• 16 x 600GB 15K rpm SAS
VMware View Desktop Clients:
ISOs, Software, VM Template storage
1 x EqualLogic PS6000XV
• 16 x 600GB 15K rpm SAS
1 x EqualLogic PS6000XV
• 16 x 600GB 10K rpm SAS
1 x EqualLogic PS6000S
• 16 x 50GB SSD
Infrastructure Data and VMs:
- ISOs, Software, VM Templates
- RAWC Server, vCenter Server, Active Directory, View
Connection Brokers, Email Server
Network Switches
Dell PowerConnect M6220
Ethernet blade switch for external and internal LAN
connectivity (VMware Service Console, Server LAN)
Dell PowerConnect M6348
Ethernet blade switch for 1GbE iSCSI
Dell PowerConnect 6248
External switch for 1GbE iSCSI
Software
VMware ESX 4.1 Enterprise Plus
Hypervisor
VMware View 4.5 Premier Edition
VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Application
Windows 7 Enterprise Edition
View Client OS for characterization tests
Windows Server 2008 Standard x64
For Domain Controller,, vCenter Server, Microsoft SQL
server, Exchange 2010 and other infrastructure VMs
MS Office 2007
Applications used to generate user workload
RAWC 1.2
VMware View VDI workload generation
Management and Monitoring
EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters 2.1
Storage Monitoring