White Papers

Sizing and Best Practices for Deploying VMware View 4.5
on VMware vSphere 4.1 with Dell EqualLogic Storage
1
1 Introduction
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions are starting to gain considerable foothold. In addition to
the traditional server virtualization benefits, VDI solutions can provide significant additional cost
savings due to streamlined implementation and ease of management.
In VDI environments the storage infrastructure must be carefully designed and sized to meet I/O
performance requirements while supporting efficient capacity utilization. The goal of this paper is to
present the results of a series of VDI tests conducted by Dell Labs, and provide storage sizing guidance
and best practices for designing and running VMware® View 4.5 based virtual desktop infrastructures.
Our test infrastructure included:
• VMware® vSphere™ 4.1 Enterprise Plus
• Dell™ PowerEdge™ M610 blade servers
• Dell™ PowerConnect™ switches
• Dell™ EqualLogic™ SANs.
1.1 Audience
This paper is intended for solution architects, storage network engineers, system administrators and IT
managers who need to understand how to design, properly size and deploy VMware View based VDI
solutions using Dell EqualLogic storage. It is expected that the reader has working knowledge of
VMware vSphere system administration, Microsoft® Windows® server and client operating system
administration, iSCSI SAN network design and Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN operation.
1.2 The Rest of this Paper
The rest of this paper contains the following sections:
 Section 2, Virtual Desktop Infrastructures on page 2
 Section 3, VMware View Infrastructure and Test Configuration on page 5
 Section 4, VMware View 4.5 Characterization Tests on page 13
 Section 5, Sizing Guidelines for EqualLogic SANs on page 21
 Section 6, Best Practices on page 25