ESX planning for VDI

[tosodj]

Hi

Someone can suggest me a typical configuration for an ESX server using for deploy about 20-30 virtual desktop with 512mb Ram and 20Gb hard drive?

thanks

bye

[christianZ]

We have here "older" 4 x Xeon DC 2.6 Ghz and 16 GB RAM hosts and they are not full saturated with ~25 vms - the RAM will be the first issue here.

So I think a new 2 x Xeon QC (2.0 GHz) and 24 GB RAM should be good enough. You need of course disk space too. The quiestion is - do you want to use san or das. 30 vms x 20 GB = 600 GB, + 30 x 512 MB vms' swap space -> ~ 800-900 GB will be needed here, I think.

Don't forget - the more disks spindles you have the better random ios performance you get.

[tosodj]

I haven't yet decided if use San o Das .

What is the better solution for avoid bottlenecks or bad performance?

[christianZ]

With SAN and e.g. 2 Esx hosts you can get higher availability (vmotion, HA, DRS). The SAN is of course more complex (and expensive) as DAS, but you can expand it simpler when you need it.

[lettech]

Hi there, do you have a prefered vendor?

You could go for an HP DL585 with dual procs (you won't need quad to run 30 VDI VM's) and 32GB RAM. You could go for a DL385 with the same configuration but to get 32GB RAM in there you need to buy the 4GB DIMMS which are still pretty costly.

All the best!

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I would consider how much memory to give each VM. 512MBs is enough to run most applications, but users may want 1GB. Memory will always be your major stumbling block. I would start at 512MB and only go up if it is absolutely necessary and there is an approval process in place that includes some form of justification.

As for disk.. you have a few options... VMware Starter gives you NFS as an option. THere is no VCB for this option and vMotion while can be a one off for the license is not included with starter. NFS runs at 70% of the speed of the wire maximally. I would say closer to 65% with the NFS overhead. There is a post on tuning NFS within the forums as well. You will need a very good NFS server, windows is not a good NFS server but LINUX or UNIX is.

If you go up in license you can use iSCSI which runs at 70% of the speed of the wire maximally, or SAN which may run closer to 90% the speed of the wire. If you are going with iSCSI I suggest an iSCSI TOE NIC instead of standard NICs as things will speed up. iSCSI while does support VCB, vMotion, etc is roughly half the speed of SAN. SAN is the best way to go unto 10G is available within ESX currently.

iSCSI/NFS run over GigE ports and SAN runs over 2GB or 4GB ports, depending on your fabric in use.

Using more spindles will help performance for everything. Using more than a single VMFS will also help with everything as you can manually load balance networks across the remote storage. There is no built in load balance features.

Of course you can use something like a MSA500 as well, which gives you local scsi speeds but only supports up to 4 servers attached at anytime. And has limited disk space but may meet your needs.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky, author of the forthcoming 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', publishing January 2008, (c) 2008 Pearson Education.