User guide

1.0 Goal

The goal of this document is to provide architectural design and sizing guidelines for the hosting of small-to-large

scale Citrix XenDesktop 4 and Citrix XenApp environments in a Cisco Data Center Fabric environment. This

document presents one of a portfolio of design documents intended to simplify, ease and accelerate the

deployment of Cisco VXI Desktop Virtualization Solutions. This specific document reports the results of a study

evaluating the scalability of the Citrix XenDesktop environment on Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS) B-

Series Blade Servers connected to NetApp Storage arrays. This document reflects the best practice

recommendations and sizing guidelines for large-scale customer deployments of XenDesktops in FlexPod

environments.

1.1 Audience

This document is intended to assist solution architects, sales engineers, field engineers and consultants in

planning, design, and deployment of Citrix XenDesktop hosted desktop virtualization solutions on the Cisco

Unified Computing System. This document assumes that the reader has an architectural understanding of the

Cisco Unified Computing System, Citrix desktop software, NetApp storage system, and related software.

1.2 Objectives

This document is intended to articulate the design considerations and validation efforts required to design and

deploy Citrix XenDesktops on the Cisco Unified Computing System with NetApp storage running in a virtualized

environment on top of Citrix XenServer. The desktop virtualization hosting solution described in this paper forms a

core building block of the Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) solution that delivers an end-to-end

data center, network and end point solutions for desktop virtualization and voice and video communications.