Citrix/TS and AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing?

[MikaA]

Joop,

has anyone had any experience on running/testing Terminal Services on Barcelona? I'm mostly interested in knowing whether the RVI actually help with TS or not? In theory TS sounds like something it actually might help with but a theory is just a theory..

We are planning on running TS and are pondering whether do it on physical or virtualized servers. From what I've read it seems ESX has gotten better with TS with every release and I was hoping it would be more than good enough nowadays..

[mreferre]

I wrote about this theory months ago ...

I am not sure about "it seems ESX has gotten better with TS with every release and I was hoping it would be more than good enough nowadays." ... I think that even the latest versions are a bit in trouble to run such a workload (although it's probably better than 4 years ago).

RVI should improve this further.... in theory .....

Massimo.

[MikaA]

Yeah, I read that article, good stuff.

We are thinking and planning about start using TS and are looking into different ways to do this. Currently we are thinking of going at it by starting with virtual machines first and if that doesn't seem to scale well enough, expand with physical ones.

I understand it's hard to say anything about scaling as it depends on workloads but we are hoping to scale to at least 50 basic office users per server (1-2 vcpu). Any thoughts if this is "way out there in twilight zone" or actually achievable?

I was kind of hoping there would be someone with large TS environments experimenting with virtualization and coming out saying "we get xx TS users on virtual server and RVI seems to get us xx% more" but it may be a bit too early and wishful thinking for that..

[mreferre]

50 basic office users <should> be achievable IF RVI delivers on the promises ......

The problem with RVI (and Barcelona in general) is that, while we have been talking about it for more than 12 months, it has just started to actually ship due to all sort of problems AMD had ...

Massimo.

[MikaA]

Yeah, luckily our new server procurement process was delayed quite a few months and is only now happening..

Do you know how well RVI is supported on ESX?

[mreferre]

Well....... "well" is a subjective concept .......

It would be like saying how well a vm scale in performance ...... well I guess it depends on the sw that runs on top of it ...

My speculation was that, gievn the TS/Citrix usage patterns, it should benefit the most from RVI.

Massimo.

[MikaA]

Ah, no, I meant whether it needed some special support from ESX side to actually work or to give any benefit at all, or is it something that "just works", whatever that would mean..

[mreferre]

ah ok.

If I remember well the default policy is "if you detect RVI use it". You can ovverride the default flagging "never use RVI" or "always use RVI" (what does this mean? bah...).

You can check this in the advanced properties of the VM .....

Support has been introduced since 3.5

Massimo.