User guide

2.0 Summary of Main Findings

The hosting of Citrix XenDesktop Hosted Virtual Desktops (VDI) and Hosted Shared Virtual Desktops models and

FlexCast with Citrix XenServer Hypervisors on Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers and NetApp storage were

successfully validated.

The Cisco UCS B250 M2 Extended Memory Blade Servers offer an optimal memory configuration that allows

virtual desktop hosting servers to use the full CPU capabilities of the servers. The 192 GB of memory allowed a

high density of desktop sessions per Cisco UCS B250 M2 Extended Memory Blade Servers while offering 1.5 GB

of memory to be allocated per desktop-based virtual machine. We were able to scale to 110 Microsoft Windows 7

desktops while running a knowledge worker load.

The validated environment consisted of a completely virtualized infrastructure with virtual machines hosted by

Citrix XenServer. All the virtual desktop and supporting infrastructure components including Active Directory,

Citrix Provisioning Server, and the Citrix XenDesktop Desktop Delivery Controllers were hosted in a virtual

machine environment on Citrix XenServer 5.6.

The tested design showed linear scalability when expanding from 1 server to 16 servers. The performance testing

showed that the same user desktop experience and response times were achieved with 110 desktops running on

1 server as with 1760 desktops running on 16 servers.

The integrated management model and rapid provisioning capabilities of Cisco UCS Manager makes it easy for

scaling the number of desktops from small pilots on a single UCS chassis to very large organization-wide

deployments running on tens of chassis.

The testing validates that the 10Gbps Unified Fabric provides a high performance; scalable infrastructure and

offers deterministic performance with respect to user response times during the load and stress testing.

The testing validates that the tested reference architecture can scale linearly from 1 chassis to 4 chassis and

beyond without making any changes to the design or infrastructure components. This also requires the proper

backend storage scaling as provided by NetApp storage.

Desktop virtual machine ―Boot-up‖ or ―Logon‖ Storms (from rapid concurrent or simultaneous user logons) need to

be considered in the server and storage design as they have largest substantial scalability impact on this solution

as well as VDI environments in general. The reference architecture represented in this document was able to

handle the additional stresses presented by the most extreme boot-up and log-on storm conditions.