Anyone ever get a stable VDI up and running?

sizeon

In my current job and past experience VDI such as xendesktop is always "flaky". Anyone ever experienced a stable VDI environment where everything works as well as a desktop? We are using hp thin clients and xendesktop 7.5

elTorito

We've been running a fully virtualized desktop environment for 3-4 years now. VMware View, 650-700 desktops, Wyse Teradici2 thin clients. We've had our share of problems in the first year, but generally, stable and performing "OK".

Greatest complaint from our end users? Mainly that performance isn't as snappy as a fat client desktop PC. We're looking to integrate some form of all-flash storage to accelerate VDI in the coming year (Fusion-IO, ExtremIO), which probably is our biggest bottleneck right now.

jibbajabba

I think with anything in virtualization - whilst initially the requirements may have been a lot lower, the fact that you now "can" - means you start to deploy a lot more than intended.

What I mean - I have seen a few times where the environment was scaled for say, 100 desktops, but because it was soooo easy to deploy new ones, the infrastructure has grown to two or three times as much - with the underlying infrastructure remaining the same.

Same with "normal" private clouds. The virtual infrastructure has been scaled for x amounts of VMs, but now out of a sudden people realize how easy it is to use and deploy, so now there are n-times as much.

kohr-ah

When I worked at the MSP job we built a xenapp xendesktop setup for a company and it ran no problem for two years (then I left so I am guessing still going) but the biggest issue was just as the others said. Performance.

philz1982

I've designed several VDI implementations. Where I find things "failing" is when an image is not stressed tested before the implementation. What I mean by this is. The hang up is usually on the Server or Pipe and not the client themselves. If you detail out compute, storage, and pipe requirements in worst case scenarios add 10% upward flex you tend to end up with a high quality system with very few issues.

Now, that's assuming your AD, SSO, and other LDAP/Role based services are setup right.....

powmia

Most user complaints I have seen are about the lack of video processing for collaboration apps. Users expect the same applications to work on a zero client as they would on a thick client. It doesnt matter how much memory or disk space you spec out your servers with if your clients are pissed that they cant render the same software.

discount81

Yes at a previous job for several thousand desktops using VMWare View, we had very few problems, but we spent tens of millions on the back end and spent a long time testing and then incrementally adding users to see how the performance was.

Later I worked on a contract where VDI ran like crap, but the SOE image they were using was a pretty standard Windows 7 image with all the graphics effects etc still on, and they didn't really have enough back end power imho to run VDI.

I'd suggest looking at the image first, get rid of anything not required, put policies in for all machines to turn on windows classic mode so that you are not using extra CPU to render graphics, remove any windows features that don't get used, lock the desktop as a solid colour, or small logo, so users can't put a 50meg jpeg as their background etc.