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BP1018 Sizing and Best Practices for Citrix XenDesktop with Dell EqualLogic Storage 37
7.3 Network configuration
The key recommendations related to network design are listed below.
• We recommend using at least two dedicated physical NICs per server for each of the networks
listed below:
o VDI network
o Management, Infrastructure, and vMotion network
o iSCSI SAN
• Use VLANs to segregate different types of network traffic such as the Management network,
Infrastructure network, and the vMotion network. This helps in improving manageability,
performance, and security. See Appendix C for more detailed VLAN configuration information.
• vSwitches on ESXi 4.1 servers are configured with 120 virtual ports by default. This number of
ports may not be sufficient specifically on ESXi servers hosting virtual desktops. Consider
increasing this value based on the number of desktops that will be hosted on each ESXi server.
• The IP addresses of virtual desktops should be configured using DHCP server and the IP
subnet should have enough IP addresses in one or more subnets for each virtual desktop.
• We recommend disabling spanning tree on switch ports connecting to end devices like server
ports and storage ports. The Portfast setting should be enabled on the switch for these ports.
Note: General recommendations for EqualLogic PS Series array network configuration and
performance are provided in the following document:
PS Series Array Network Performance Guidelines:
http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=5229
7.4 Citrix infrastructure
7.4.1 Read-only vDisk
vDisks should be presented as shared storage across multiple provisioning servers and the SAN volume
should be formatted with a file system. However, Windows NTFS does not support concurrent
read/write access which might result in data corruption. A clustered file system or Windows clustering
services needs to be used when vDisks need to be deployed using shared SAN storage across multiple
provisioning servers. This adds complexity, overhead, and cost, so we recommend using read-only
LUNs for vDisk storage that can be concurrently accessed by multiple provisioning servers.
Some of the key benefits of this feature are:
- Completely eliminates the need to deploy shared/cluster file system software.
- Reduced complexity, overhead, and deployment costs.
- Maximum scalability and performance.
For more detailed information on how to configure read-only vDisk using EqualLogic arrays and its
relevance, please refer to the article: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX119286