Design XenDesktop for the SMB


I often receive questions around XenDesktop design like How should I design my XenDesktop environment for 50 or 100 users? What hardware should I use? What if I want to start small and slowly grow the environment? This is an interesting use case, the small to medium business. Do you need all of the bells… Continue reading Design XenDesktop for the SMB

Upcoming webinar: Virtual Desktop Design for Small Environments


Many organizations looking to implement virtual desktops are looking at fairly small deployments, fewer than 500 users. In fact, I’ve been receiving more and more questions from partners and customers asking how they can utilize XenDesktop for environments with only 50 or 100 users. Questions like: What is the recommended architecture for smaller XenDesktop deployments?… Continue reading Upcoming webinar: Virtual Desktop Design for Small Environments

Consolidate for Small Scale


The Ask the Architect email inbox is getting quite large and I’ve received some great questions. I thought I would answer a question around the small-medium business (SMB) space, as it relates directly to a recently delivered Virtual Desktops for the SMB TechTalk and the reference design included within the XenDesktop Design Handbook. Namely, the… Continue reading Consolidate for Small Scale

SAN, VDI and SMB


One of the big questions regarding virtual desktops is storage. In fact, I’ve discussed this numerous times (here and here and here). This has mostly been with a focus on IOPS. This time I want to focus on the high-availability aspect you get with shared storage, but with the focus of being on the SMB/SME… Continue reading SAN, VDI and SMB

Desktop Virtualization for the SMB


I’ve been part of quite a few desktop virtualization designs in my day. Most of these are for enterprise customers with over 10,000 desktops. When you get to this scale, you have to take into account so many different variables that you need many different options. What about the SMB organizations? The smaller organizations (500… Continue reading Desktop Virtualization for the SMB