White Papers

BP1018 Sizing and Best Practices for Citrix XenDesktop with Dell EqualLogic Storage 1
1 Introduction
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) products such as Citrix® XenDesktop® can provide organizations
with significant cost savings, streamlined implementation, and ease of desktop management. In order
to achieve these VDI benefits and to ensure optimal user experience, storage infrastructure design and
sizing considerations need to be addressed carefully.
The goal of this paper is to present the results of a series of storage I/O performance tests conducted
by Dell™ Labs and provide storage sizing guidance and best practices based on those results for a
Citrix XenDesktop based VDI solution.
Our test infrastructure included:
• Citrix XenDesktop 5.0
• VMware® vSphere™ 4.1 Hypervisor™
• Dell PowerEdge™ M610 blade servers
• Dell PowerConnect™ switches
• Dell EqualLogic™ SANs
The primary objectives of our testing were:
• Determine how many virtual desktops can be deployed using a single Dell EqualLogic
PS6010XVS virtualized iSCSI SAN array with acceptable user experience indicators for task
workers.
• Determine the performance impact on the storage array during peak I/O activity such as boot
and login storms.
• Determine how to scale the number of virtual desktops by adding additional storage array
members.
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 Citrix XenDesktop based
VDI solutions using Dell EqualLogic storage. It is expected that the reader has working knowledge of
Citrix XenDesktop architecture, VMware vSphere system administration, iSCSI SAN network design,
and Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN operation.