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 or fewer desktops) probably don’t need as many options and flavors of virtual desktops. In fact, one can create an architecture that meets the needs of the SMB but without all of the components and features. See for yourself by accessing the XenDesktop Design Handbook.
Over the next few weeks, we will have a discussion on this exact topic. What are the design decisions? What are the ramifications of doing and not doing application virtualization? What is the critical path to success? Stay tuned and keep watching the SMB space on the Virtualize My Desktop blog for a great discussion.
Daniel – Lead Architect
which version of Netscaler VPX would you recommend for SMB?
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Details of the version is here: http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=2300454
which one? Really depends on what you plan to do with it. doing HA for XenDesktop, you can get by with the smallest. Doing SSL-VPN, you can get by with the smallest for 300 concurrent VPN users. Really it is going to come down to how many users are going through the SSL-VPN. Even though they all support 300 users, they support different levels of SSL throughput. You need to determine how much bandwidth your VPN users require. Here is some info for you to figure that out: https://virtualfeller.com/tag/bandwidth/
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I have started looking into network segmentation – so I started to wonder when should I begin to segment my network ie. isolate PVS traffic from my normal ICA and desktop traffic? I guess best practice is to isolate the PVS traffic on dedicated VLANs and NICS – but will this be necessary to introduce such complexity when doing SMB – sub 200 desktops?
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Nope. Two schools of thought on this.
1. Segmenting makes things look nicer from a logical perspective
2. Not segmenting simplifies the overall infrastructure
We have seen very little performance difference when you segment and when you do not. I’m always under the premise of keeping things simple.
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