EMC END-USER COMPUTING

Transcription

1 EMC END-USER COMPUTING Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VxRail Appliance Scalable, proven virtual desktop solution from EMC and Citrix Simplified deployment and management Hyper-converged infrastructure appliance Validated performance minimizes risk EMC Solutions Abstract This describes the high-level architecture to deploy an End- User Computing solution for Citrix XenDesktop and VMware vsphere, powered by the VxRail Appliance. October 2016

2 Copyright 2016 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. Published October 2016 EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. The information in this publication is provided as is. EMC Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. EMC 2, EMC, CloudArray, VNX, VCE, VxRail and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. Part Number H Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

3 Contents Reference architecture overview... 4 Solution architecture... 5 Key components... 7 Storage and network configuration Desktop provisioning mechanism Other common operations testing Validated environment profile Reference architecture configuration Conclusion References

4 Reference architecture overview Document purpose This document describes the reference architecture of the EMC End-User Computing (EUC) solution, which is enabled by the VxRail Appliance family, Citrix XenDesktop 7.9, and VMware vsphere 6.0. It also describes how VxRail can simplify and optimize your EUC deployment. This document is not a comprehensive guide to every aspect of this solution, but rather an overview. Refer to the corresponding Solution Guide for additional details. Business challenge IT organizations can no longer simply just support the business, they must become the business enabler. For organizations of all sizes, IT infrastructure must support constant business demands for new applications and services with limited budgets and resources. Yet there is limited time to constantly evaluate and integrate hardware, software, and networking solutions to meet continuously evolving requirements. You must create a dynamic infrastructure that adapts to your business demands. When your IT infrastructure impedes your ability to mobilize and adapt to new ways of doing business, you cannot meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or new business initiatives have to wait. You try to modernize your IT infrastructure to meet emerging business demands, yet constant maintenance requirements, long integration periods, and elongated technology evaluation cycles hamper your efforts. Today's consumers of IT resources often run advanced application suites and require access to those applications anytime, from anywhere, on any device. The lack of a simple, repeatable, infrastructure lifecycle can inhibit your organization s ability to innovate and respond to market demands. You must be less reactive and find an IT infrastructure solution that gets your organization to the next level. Like other organizations, you might not be able to confidently predict application growth. Now you can extend the benefits of converged infrastructure to applications and workloads that start small, even if you do not know how fast and large they will grow. The solution is EMC Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is one of the leading virtualized workloads being deployed today. Well-engineered VDI environments can substantially reduce capital expenditure and operating expense costs, increase security, provide predictable performance, and provide new visibility and control over your desktop environment. VDI is also one of the most complex environments to size, test, configure, deploy, scale, and monitor. This is where VxRail shines. VxRail EUC solutions from EMC provide simplicity, power, and scalability, all based on architectures from the leaders in VDI: Citrix and EMC. 4 Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

5 Solution purpose Solution benefits This reference architecture demonstrates the functionality, performance, and scalability of virtual desktops enabled by VxRail with Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0. The reference architecture is built on a VxRail 160 platform with VMware Virtual SAN providing data storage for the infrastructure, virtual desktops, and user data. The VxRail Appliance, jointly developed by EMC and VMware, is the only hyperconverged infrastructure appliance on the market that is fully integrated, preconfigured, and tested with VMware Hyper-Converged Software. The appliance provides a fast, easy way to extend your VMware environment. Scale-out is easy you simply add a new appliance to join an existing VxRail Appliance cluster. Select from a broad set of configuration options at a variety of price and scale points, including allflash, for up to 16 VxRail Appliances to achieve exceptional scalability. The VxRail Appliance automatically discovers and non-disruptively adds each new appliance and rebalances resources and workloads across the cluster, creating a single resource pool. Using this foundation, EMC added Citrix XenDesktop 7.9, incorporating best practices from EMC, Citrix, and VMware. Through extensive testing, EMC provides an optimal configuration for VDI deployments including various provisioning methods. Using Login VSI, EMC then validated the performance to ensure the optimal configuration. We value your feedback! EMC and the authors of this document welcome your feedback on the solution and the solution documentation. Contact EMC.Solution.Feedback@emc.com with your comments. Please quote Part Number H15444 in the subject line. Authors: Hui Gao, David Hartman, and Michael Weijers. Solution architecture Architecture overview This reference architecture uses VxRail, an HCI, which can support thousands of Windows virtual desktops at scale. VxRail provides the compute, storage, and virtualization platform for a Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 environment with Microsoft Windows virtual desktops. Figure 1 shows the overall physical architecture of the solution. 5

6 Figure 1. Reference architecture components Hardware resources Table 1 lists the hardware configuration for all VxRail configurations. Refer to Table 5 for the virtual machine and workload profile. Table 1. Hardware details CPU VxRail 60 VxRail 120 VxRail 160 VxRail 200 Intel Xeon E v3 1.6 GHz Dual Intel Xeon E v3 2.4 GHz Dual Intel Xeon E v3 2.4 GHz Dual Intel Xeon E v3 2.6 GHz Memory 64 GB 128 GB, 192 GB or 256 GB 256 GB or 512 GB 256 GB or 512 GB Network 4 Port 1 GbE Dual Port 10 GbE Dual Port 10 GbE Dual Port 10 GbE storage 3.6 TB 10 TB 4.8 TB 10 TB 6 Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

7 Software resources Table 2 lists the software used to validate the solution. Table 2. Solution software Software Description Version VxRail VxRail software VMware ESXi server VMware vsphere build VMware vcenter server vcenter Server Appliance build Desktop broker Citrix XenDesktop 79 EMC CloudArray CloudArray virtual appliance Key components This reference architecture applies to all four VxRail configurations to support different numbers of virtual desktops. VxRail An integrated, preconfigured, and pre-tested VMware hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. Based on VMware s vsphere, Virtual SAN, and EMC software, VxRail delivers an all-in-one IT infrastructure transformation by using a known and proven building block for the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). VMware vsphere 6 Provides a common virtualization layer to host the infrastructure server and virtual desktop environment. It provides high availability in the virtualization layer with vsphere features such as VMware High Availability clusters and VMware vmotion and VMware Storage vmotion. VMware vcenter Server Appliance 6 vsphere hosts and their virtual machines are managed indirectly through a vcenter Server Appliance that is preloaded with the VxRail software. When deployed with Citrix XenDesktop, vcenter acts as a management proxy and communicates with front-end Citrix management and provisioning services. Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 Provides virtual desktop delivery, authenticates users, manages the assembly of users' virtual desktop environments, and brokers connections between users and their virtual desktops. In this reference architecture, Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 is installed on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and hosted as a virtual machine on a VMware vsphere 6 virtual machine. Two Delivery Controller Servers were used in this solution. Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) takes a different approach from traditional desktop imaging solutions by fundamentally changing the relationship between hardware and the software that runs on it. By streaming a single shared disk image (vdisk) instead of copying images to individual machines, PVS enables organizations to reduce the number of disk images that they manage. As the number of machines continues to grow, PVS 7

8 VxRail Appliance provides the efficiency of centralized management with the benefits of distributed processing. Eight PVS Servers hosted on vsphere virtual machines were used in this solution. Machine Creation Services (MCS 1 ) A provisioning mechanism integrated with the XenDesktop management interface, Citrix Studio, to provision, manage, and decommission desktops throughout the desktop lifecycle from a centralized point of management. Citrix Personal vdisk (PvD) Allows users to preserve customization settings and user-installed applications in a pooled non-persistent desktop. Virtual desktops The solution was validated with PVS and MCS desktops running 64-bit Windows 7 or Windows 10. VMware vrealize Log Insight Appliance The vrealize Log Insight Appliance is preloaded with the VxRail software to provide real-time log management for the VMware environment. EMC CloudArray Helps customers meet current and future storage needs by extending their local capacity with on-demand cloud storage for backup, data growth, and disaster recovery. In this solution, the virtual desktop user data and user profile are stored in Common Internet File System (CIFS) shares from CloudArray. Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controllers and DNS servers Provide Active Directory services to manage the identities and relationships that constitute the Windows environment for the virtual desktops. The Domain Name System (DNS) component of the Windows network infrastructure is also installed on these servers. These servers are hosted as virtual machines on VMware vsphere 6 hosts. Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server Centrally manages the IP address scheme for virtual desktops. This service is hosted on one of the domain controller virtual machines. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Citrix XenDesktop Delivery Controller servers require a database service to store configuration and monitoring details. EMC used Microsoft SQL Server 2012 running on a Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machine on a vsphere host for this purpose. VxRail Appliance is the only fully integrated, pre-configured, and tested hyperconverged appliance jointly developed by EMC and VMware and powered by VMware Hyper-Converged Software (HCS). VxRail is the easiest and fastest way to simplify and extend a VMware environment, while dramatically reducing IT operations complexity along with capital and operational costs. VxRail Appliance is the only hyper-converged appliance that provides kernel layer integration between VMware Virtual SAN and the vsphere hypervisor, delivering unique and unmatched performance and efficiency benefits. 1 Citrix official support of MCS on VMware Virtual SAN is expected in a future release of XenDesktop. EMC tested this configuration and found no observable issues. 8 Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

9 VxRail seamlessly integrates with off-the-shelf VMware tools, providing a familiar experience. VxRail is the new standard in hyper-converged appliances. The VxRail Appliance combines virtualization, compute, storage, management, and data protection with a single point of support for the hardware and software in an efficient 2U/4-node building block. The VxRail Appliance delivers resiliency, quality of service (QoS), and centralized management functionality enabling faster, better, and simpler management of consolidated workloads, virtual desktops, businesscritical applications, and remote office infrastructure. VxRail is available in multiple configurations, including all-flash options that feature enterprise-class data efficiency services, including deduplication, compression, and erasure coding, which enhance performance and offer greater effective capacity. See Figure 2. Figure 2. VxRail All-Flash and Hybrid configurations The VxRail Appliance enables you to power on and then create the virtual machine in minutes, radically easy deployment, one-click non-disruptive patches and upgrades, and simplified management. VxRail Appliances also seamlessly extend to more than 20 public clouds, including vcloud Air, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. They securely expand storage capacity without limits, providing an additional 10 TB of on-demand cloud storage per appliance. You can also add more cloud-storage capacity as needed. In our configuration, EMC used a public cloud configuration for hosting user data & profiles. VxRail Appliances expand the EMC Converged Infrastructure (CI) portfolio of blocks, racks, and appliances to deliver a unique, comprehensive, converged and hyperconverged solution from the data center core to the edge. VxRail is backed by a single point of contact that includes 24/7 support for the default hardware and software preloaded on the appliance. Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 XenDesktop is the desktop virtualization solution from Citrix that enables virtual desktops to run on the VMware vsphere virtualization environment. Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 integrates Citrix XenApp application delivery technologies and XenDesktop desktop virtualization technologies into a single architecture and management experience. This new architecture unifies both management and delivery components 9

10 to enable a scalable, simple, efficient, and manageable solution for delivering Windows applications and desktops as secure mobile services to users anywhere on any device. Figure 3 shows the XenDesktop 7.9 architecture components. Figure 3. XenDesktop 7.9 architecture components The XenDesktop 7.9 architecture includes the following components: Citrix Director Director is a web-based tool that enables IT support and help desk teams to monitor an environment, troubleshoot issues before they become system-critical, and perform support tasks for end users. Citrix Receiver Installed on user devices, Citrix Receiver provides users with quick, secure, self-service access to documents, applications, and desktops from any of the user s devices including smartphones, tablets, and PCs. Receiver provides on-demand access to Windows, web, and software-as-aservice (SaaS) applications. Citrix StoreFront StoreFront provides authentication and resource delivery services for Citrix Receiver. It enables centralized control of resources and provides users with on-demand, self-service access to their desktops and applications. Citrix Studio Studio is the management console that enables you to configure and manage your deployment, eliminating the need for separate consoles for managing delivery of applications and desktops. Studio provides various wizards to guide you through the process of setting up your environment, creating your workloads to host applications and desktops, and assigning applications and desktops to users. Delivery Controller Installed on servers in the data center, Delivery Controller consists of services that communicate with the hypervisor to distribute applications and desktops, authenticate and manage user access, and broker connections between users and their virtual desktops and applications. 10 Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

11 Delivery Controller manages the state of the desktops, starting and stopping them based on demand and administrative configuration. In some editions, the controller enables you to install profile management to manage user personalization settings in virtualized or physical Windows environments. License Server License server assigns a user or device license to the XenDesktop environment. Install License server along with other Citrix XenDesktop components or on a separate virtual or physical machine. Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) Installed on server or workstation operating systems, the VDA enables connections for desktops and applications. For remote PC access, install the VDA on the office PC. Database Database stores all the XenDesktop site configuration and session information. Microsoft SQL server is required as a database server. Server OS machines Virtual machines or physical machines, based on the Windows Server operating system, used for delivering applications or hosted shared desktops (HSDs) to users. Desktop OS machines Virtual or physical machines, based on the Windows Desktop operating system, deliver personalized desktops to users or applications from desktop operating systems. Citrix Provisioning Services Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) takes a different approach from traditional desktop imaging solutions. By streaming a single shared disk image (vdisk) instead of copying images to individual machines, PVS lets organizations reduce the number of disk images that they manage. As the number of machines continues to grow, PVS provides the efficiency of centralized management with the benefits of distributed processing. Because machines stream disk data dynamically in real time from a single shared image, machine image consistency is ensured. In addition, large pools of machines can completely change their configuration, applications, and even the operating system during a reboot operation. Machine Creation Services Machine Creation Services (MCS) is a provisioning mechanism that is integrated with the XenDesktop management interface, Citrix Studio, to provision, manage, and decommission desktops throughout the desktop lifecycle from a centralized point of management. MCS enables the management of several types of machines within a catalog in Citrix Studio. Desktop customization is persistent for machines that use the Personal vdisk (PvDisk or PvD) feature, while non-personal vdisk machines are appropriate if desktop changes are to be discarded when the user logs off. Desktops that are provisioned using MCS share a common base image within a catalog. Typically, the base image is accessed with sufficient frequency to use the VMware Virtual SAN cache, where frequently accessed data is promoted to flash drives to provide optimal I/O response time with fewer physical disks. 11

12 Citrix Personal vdisk The Citrix Personal vdisk (PvDisk or PvD) feature enables users to preserve customization settings and user-installed applications in a pooled desktop by redirecting the changes from the user s pooled virtual machine to a separate PvDisk. During runtime, the content of the PvDisk is blended with the content from the base virtual machine to provide a unified experience to the end user. The PvDisk data is preserved during reboot and refresh operations. Citrix Profile Management Citrix Profile Management preserves user profiles and dynamically synchronizes them with a remote profile repository. Profile Management downloads a user s remote profile dynamically when the user logs in to XenDesktop, and applies personal settings to desktops and applications regardless of the user s login location or client device. The combination of Profile Management and pooled desktops provides the experience of a dedicated desktop while potentially minimizing the amount of storage required in an organization. Storage and network configuration VxRail storage configuration The storage layer is a key component of any VDI solution that serves data generated by applications and operating systems in a data center storage processing system. VxRail uses Virtual SAN storage to provide virtualization at the storage layer. This increases storage efficiency and management flexibility, and reduces total cost of ownership. Virtual SAN is integrated in your VxRail Appliance to provide Software-Defined Storage (SDS). Virtual SAN is not a VMware vsphere Storage Appliance, but is embedded in the ESXi hypervisor kernel's I/O data path. As a result, Virtual SAN can deliver higher performance with minimum CPU and memory overhead. Virtual SAN pools the VxRail Appliance internal solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) on the ESXi hosts to present a single datastore for all hosts in the cluster. It uses a highly available, distributed, object-based architecture. Virtual SAN mirrors and distributes the individual virtual disk (VMDK) files across the datastore. The VxRail Series lets virtualization infrastructure administrators manage storage on a per-virtual machine basis. This virtual machine-centric approach allows storage policies to be defined at virtual machine-level granularity for provisioning and load balancing. Virtual SAN is fully integrated with vsphere, which simplifies setting up the availability, capacity, and performance policies. 12 Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

13 EMC CloudArray gateway extends the VxRail Appliance with scalable cloud storage offered by third-party cloud providers. EMC used the cloud provider storage as an overflow to contain user data. This provided the caching benefits of CloudArray while providing an extensible storage space. IP network is a standard Ethernet network with redundant cabling and switching carries all network traffic. User, and management traffic is carried over public, routable networks, while Virtual SAN storage traffic is carried over a private, nonroutable network. Table 3 shows an example of the disk configurations for a VxRail 160 appliance in this solution. VxRail creates a Virtual SAN datastore from all the local disk drives in Table 3. This Virtual SAN datastore is used by vsphere to store all the infrastructure servers and virtual desktops. For other models, refer to the VxRail resources on the website. Table 3. VxRail 160 disk configurations Profile characteristic Value SSD per node 800 GB * 1 10K Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) per node Virtual SAN datastore capacity 1.2 TB * TB In this solution, both PVS and MCS virtual desktops were validated with thin provisioning using a standard desktop image. In the customer environment, the capacity of each virtual desktop might be different from what was used in validation. Consult the VxRail Sizing Tool for complete information. Network configuration The VxRail Appliance nodes include sufficient network adapters to provide ample bandwidth for storage, management, virtual machine, and client access traffic. All that is required is sufficient switching capacity. This solution was tested using two interconnected Cisco switches to provide a fully redundant network architecture which eliminates single points of failure. Most similar enterprise-grade switches with sufficient capacity can be used, such as those switches from Dell or Brocade. This solution uses virtual local area networks (VLANs) to segregate network traffic of various types to improve throughput, manageability, application separation, high availability, and security. This solution requires a minimum of three VLANs: Client access network Virtual machine networking and CIFS traffic (these are public customer-facing networks, which can be separated if needed) Storage network vsan networking (private network) Management network vsphere management and VMware vmotion (private network) 13

14 I1 I2 MGMT 0 MGMT 1 CONSOIE `STAT Cisco Nexus 5020 PS1 PS v-6A 50~60Hz I1 I2 MGMT 0 MGMT 1 CONSOIE `STAT Cisco Nexus 5020 PS1 PS v-6A 50~60Hz Figure 4 shows the network connectivity between the switches and the VxRail Appliance. Use at least two network switches to avoid a single point of failure in the network layer. VxRail Appliance Links from each node to Switch 1 Links from each node to Switch 2 Redundant Switch Interconnect Switch 1 SIOT2 SIOT2 Switch 2 SIOT3 SIOT3 Figure 4. Network layout diagram All network interfaces on the vsphere servers in this solution use 10-gigabit Ethernet connections. EMC assigned IP addresses to all virtual desktops by using a DHCP server. VxRail creates a distributed switch for the cluster by using the two 10 GbE NICs in each node. Table 4 lists the port groups configured on the distributed switch. Note: Jumbo frames are enabled across all interfaces. Table 4. Distributed port groups configured on the distributed switch Virtual switch Configured port groups VLAN ID Used for Management Network Management network VMkernel port for vsphere host management VxRail Management Management network VMkernel port for the VxRail management VxRail Distributed Switch vcenter Server Network Management network Network connection for vcenter Server and VMware vrealize Log Insight Virtual SAN Storage network VMkernel for Virtual SAN storage traffic Virtual Machine vsphere vmotion Client access network Management network Network connection for virtual desktops and infrastructure servers VMkernel port for vsphere vmotion 14 Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

15 Desktop provisioning mechanism Overview PVS desktops This solution was validated using PVS and MCS virtual desktops, both random and static (with PvD) to observe any performance and scaling differences between various provisioning methods. Provisioning Services streaming technology allows computers to be provisioned and re-provisioned in real-time from a single shared-disk image. vdisks can exist on a Provisioning Server, file share, or in larger deployments, on a storage system that the Provisioning Server can communicate with (iscsi, SAN, NAS, and CIFS). vdisks can be assigned to a single target device as Private Image Mode, or to multiple target devices as Standard Image Mode. When a target device is turned on, it is set to start from the network and to communicate with a Provisioning Server. Unlike thin-client technology, processing takes place on the target device (refer to Step 1 in Figure 5). The target device downloads the boot file from a Provisioning Server (refer to Step 2), and then the target device boots. Based on the device boot configuration settings, the appropriate vdisk is located, then mounted on the Provisioning Server (refer to step 3). The software on that vdisk is streamed to the target device as needed. To the target device, it appears like a typical hard drive to the system. Figure 5 shows process of booting a target device. Figure 5. Start process of a PVS target device MCS desktops Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 with MCS supports linked clones to quickly provision virtual desktops. In a linked clone desktop, the operating system reads all the common data from the read-only base disk, and creates the unique data on the linked clone. Figure 6 shows a logical representation of this relationship. 15

16 Figure 6. Logical representation of an MCS base disk and linked clone Other common operations testing EMC also tested various other common operations under each provisioning type, including refresh, recompose, virus scan, and boot storms. The results of these tests can be found in the associated Solution Guide listed in the References section. Validated environment profile Profile characteristics Table 5 provides the environment profile used to validate the solution. The number of virtual desktops is based on the first appliance, which also hosts all requisite infrastructure components. Numbers for additional appliances are discussed later in this document. Table 5. Profile characteristics Profile characteristic Virtual desktop OS (PVS) Value Windows 10 Enterprise (64-bit) PVS PvD Windows 10 Enterprise (64-bit) PVS Random Windows 7 Enterprise (64-bit) PVS PvD Windows 10 Enterprise (64-bit) MCS PvD Virtual desktop OS (MCS) Windows 10 Enterprise (64-bit) MCS Random Windows 7 Enterprise (64-bit) MCS PvD CPU per virtual desktop Number of virtual desktops per CPU core RAM per virtual desktop Average storage available for each PVS or MCS random desktop Average storage available for each PVS or MCS static (PvD) desktop 2 vcpu Windows 10 5 Windows GB 6 GB 16 GB 16 Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

17 Profile characteristic Average storage used in the virtual desktop master image (used by Windows and applications) Number of data stores used to store virtual desktops Workload generator Value 16 GB 1 Login VSI Professional Edition Test results summary Workload type Knowledge Worker Login VSI In this solution, EMC used Login VSI as the workload generator to validate the solution. Login VSI is an industry-standard load testing solution for virtualized desktop environments. Enterprise IT departments can use Login VSI products in all phases of their virtual desktop deployment from planning to deployment to change management for more predictable performance, higher availability, and a more consistent end-user experience. Login VSI provides several kinds of workload. In this solution EMC used the Knowledge Worker workload, which is recommended by Login VSI as the standard for most VDI environments. It requires two vcpus for the virtual desktop. In addition to Office and Internet Explorer usage, this workload also includes video content. For more information, refer to Validated results In this solution, EMC validated both Windows 7 and Windows 10 virtual desktops. These operating systems showed different results, as the resource requirement are different, even when the workloads are the same. EMC also validated both PVS and MCS virtual desktops, and documented the performance and resource utilization differences for these two provisioning methods. Single appliance A VxRail Appliance consists of four independent physical nodes. As a hyperconverged infrastructure, a single VxRail Appliance contains sufficient hardware resources to scale to hundreds of virtual desktops, as well as the required infrastructure virtual servers to provision and manage the VDI environment. Table 6 shows the sizing guidance 2 for each model of a single VxRail Appliance (based on the Login VSI Knowledge Worker workload) with different operating systems. If your workload is lighter, for example equivalent to the Login VSI Office Worker workload, then the maximum desktop number will increase accordingly, in this case by a factor of two. 2 The projected maximum desktop numbers are based upon interpolated and extrapolated calculations using test results from a VxRail

18 Scaling appliances VxRail Appliances are highly configurable and scale easily, offering the flexibility of a broad set of configuration options at a variety of price and scale points. Scaling capacity and performance can easily and non-disruptively expand up to 64 nodes (16 appliances) per cluster, allowing you to start small and grow incrementally. As the first VxRail Appliance provides the hardware resources to run the infrastructure virtual servers, as shown in Figure 2, the scaling appliances can support more virtual desktops than the first appliance. Testing has shown that additional VxRail appliances can support approximately 10 percent more virtual desktop sessions than the base appliance. Table 6 shows the maximum desktop number (2 nd + appliance) that the system can support when adding an additional VxRail Appliance to the cluster. Table 6. Test results summary VxRail model VxRail 60 OS type Deployment method CPU Memory Maximum desktop number Windows 7 64-bit MCS or PVS 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows bit MCS PvD 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows bit MCS random 2 vcpu 2 GB Maximum desktop number (2 nd + appliance) Windows bit PVS (PvD or random) 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows 7 64-bit MCS or PVS 2 vcpu 2 GB VxRail 120 Windows bit MCS PvD 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows bit MCS random 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows bit PVS (PvD or random) 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows 7 64-bit MCS or PVS 2 vcpu 2 GB VxRail 160 Windows bit MCS PvD 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows bit MCS random 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows bit PVS (PvD or random) 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows 7 64-bit MCS or PVS 2 vcpu 2 GB VxRail 200 Windows bit MCS PvD 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows bit MCS random 2 vcpu 2 GB Windows bit PVS (PvD or random) 2 vcpu 2 GB Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

19 Note: Add an additional CloudArray virtual appliance for each additional VxRail Appliances to the cluster. You cannot mix VxRail 60 model with other appliance models; obtain more information from an RPQ for further qualification by EMC. Refer to the VxRail documents or EMC support for more details. Table 7. Average IOPS by provisioning & OS type Windows 10 PVS PvD 13 Windows 10 PVS Random 9.5 Average IOPS per virtual desktop at a steady state Windows 7 PVS PvD 11 Windows 10 MCS PvD 23 Windows 10 MCS Random 16.5 Windows 7 MCS PvD 14 The test results provide guidance to make decisions on how many VxRail appliances are required to support the target number of virtual desktops. The VxRail 160 model can scale up to 16 appliances (64 nodes), and can support over 3,200 virtual desktops. For additional assistance on how to size VxRail Appliances in your environment, refer to the online VxRail Sizing Tool. Reference architecture configuration Overview A VxRail Appliance consists of four independent nodes. There are four different model types, and several configurations available within each of these in terms of memory and disk sizes. Refer to Table 1 for additional information on available configurations. For this reference architecture, a VxRail 160 appliance was used, with each node having the following core hardware components: Dual Intel Xeon E v3 eight-core CPUs 256 GB of memory Dual ports 10GbE NICs Five SAS 10K RPM 1.2 TB HDD for the VMware Virtual SAN datastore One 800 GB MLC enterprise-grade SSD for the Virtual SAN read/write cache Refer to the VxRail specifications data on for more details on the hardware configuration of each model of VxRail Appliances. CPU With 64 physical CPU cores in total, this solution supports up to 360 Windows 7 or 310 Windows 10 virtual desktops (MCS random) and all the infrastructure servers running on the VxRail 160 appliance. The profile characteristics shown in Table 4 assume that all the virtual desktops are configured with two virtual CPUs. If the user 19

20 requires more virtual CPUs for the virtual desktop, modify the proposed virtual desktop count to account for the additional resource consumption. For example, you might run Windows 10 (MCS random) on a VxRail appliance and have 40 users that require four CPUs and other users that require two CPUs. These 40 virtual desktops consume the same CPU resources as 80 virtual desktops, as defined in Table 4. The supported virtual desktop count would then be 270. Memory IOPS Memory plays a key role in ensuring application functionality and performance. Each group of desktops has different targets for the amount of available memory that is considered acceptable. With a total of 1024 GB RAM (or optionally 2048 GB RAM) available on the VxRail 160 appliance, it can easily support the infrastructure virtual servers and virtual desktops running in this solution. The storage performance requirements for desktops are usually the least understood aspect of performance. The reference virtual desktop uses a workload that is generated by an industry-recognized tool to run a wide variety of applications that must be representative of the majority of virtual desktop implementations. This VxRail solution leverages the VMware Virtual SAN storage technology to take advantage of the servers local SSD and SAS disks to build a storage system with high performance and scalability to handle peak I/O load in the virtual desktop environment, while keeping response time to a minimum. Findings Storage capacity Our testing goal was to determine the maximum number of virtual desktops that the VxRail can support when running the Login VSI Knowledge Worker workload, while not exceeding VSImax (maximum virtual desktop capacity). Our results determined that this number was constrained by server CPU resources, which peaked at approximately 95 percent utilization. Memory, storage, and network resources were well below operational thresholds. Full testing details and results are available in the corresponding Solution Guide listed in the Reference section. The storage capacity requirement for a virtual desktop can vary widely depending on the type of provisioning, the types of applications in use, and specific customer policies. A single VxRail 160 provides TB of usable capacity when configured with 20 SAS 10K RPM 1.2 TB HDD. If the size requirements for your virtual desktops vary from the profile used here, review the sizing section in the Solution Guide and/or utilize the online sizing tool for additional details. Note that VxRail appliance can also be configured with larger hard drives to accommodate additional capacity requirements. The user profile data and user documents are redirected to the CIFS share provided by EMC CloudArray, which is also running on the Virtual SAN datastore provided by VxRail. This requirement can also be met by using existing file shares in the existing environment. In this solution, EMC allocated 60 GB capacity for each user. The infrastructure virtual servers also run on the VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure and share the same Virtual SAN datastore capacity with the virtual desktops and user data. 20 Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

21 Figure 7 shows an example of the capacity usage for each component in this solution when running 280 MCS PvD Windows 10 virtual desktops on VxRail 160. Figure 7. Capacity usage of 280 MCS PvD Windows 10 desktops on VxRail 160 Figure 8 shows an example of the capacity usage for each component in this solution when running 310 MCS random Windows 10 virtual desktops on VxRail 160. Figure 8. Capacity usage of 310 MCS random Windows 10 desktops on VxRail 160 Note that additional storage capacity is available if configured with larger hard drives. 21

22 Conclusion VxRail redefines simplicity by delivering virtualization, compute, storage, and data protection in an agile, scalable, and easily managed hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. The VxRail infrastructure, combined with Citrix XenDesktop 7.9, offers a fast, low-risk path to end-user computing, and supports from hundreds to thousands of virtual desktops while providing an outstanding user experience to each virtual desktop user, regardless of provisioning method. Available as a single, all-inclusive product for easy ordering, VxRail accelerates timeto-value by enabling customers power on the VxRail Appliance and create a virtual machine in as little as 15 minutes. Designed for simplicity of installation, management, patching, and upgrades, VxRail provides linear scaling that can grow based on business needs. New and improved features in Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 make it a compelling choice for VDI deployments, particularly when using VxRail. EMC has tested all available provisioning and persistency methods to make sizing a VxRail Appliance for your VDI environment simple and accurate. The solution ensures predictable performance and scalability, reducing the need for upfront investment and the burden of predicting eventual computing capacity needs. You can start small with a single 2U/4-node appliance and scale up to 16 appliances. VxRail automatically discovers and non-disruptively adds each new appliance to the cluster. The infrastructure automatically rebalances resources and workloads across the cluster, creating a single resource pool. Refer to the EMC End User Computing Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Solution Guide for more details about the solution and to review the detailed test results. Note: VxRail 60 Appliance scales to two appliances. References EMC documentation The following documents, located on EMC Online Support, provide additional information. Access to these documents depends on your login credentials. If you do not have access to a document, contact your EMC representative. EMC End User Computing Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Solution Guide VxRail Appliance 3.0 Product Guide VxRail Manager Network Validation User Guide &Troubleshooting Guide EMC CloudArray Physical Appliance and Virtual Machine Installation Guide EMC CloudArray Administrator Guide EMC CloudArray Best Practices Optimizing Microsoft Windows 10 Virtual Desktops EMC Deployment Best Practices 22 Citrix XenDesktop 7.9 and VMware vsphere 6.0 with VCE VxRail Appliance

23 Other documentation The following documents, available on the VMware website, provide additional and relevant information: VMware vsphere Installation and Setup Guide VMware vsphere Networking VMware vsphere Resource Management VMware vsphere Storage Guide VMware vsphere Virtual Machine Administration VMware vsphere Virtual Machine Management VMware vcenter Server and Host Management Installing and Administering VMware vsphere Update Manager Preparing the Update Manager Database Preparing vcenter Server Databases Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMware vsphere 6.0 The following documents, available on the Citrix website, provide additional and relevant information: Definitive Guide to XenApp 7.9 and XenDesktop 7.9 Optimizing Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktops Storage Center System Requirements The following documents, available on the Microsoft website, provide additional and relevant information: Installing Windows Server 2012 R2 SQL Server Installation (SQL Server 2012) 23