Logon: Brokering


I just experienced a 100+ second logon time for my Virtual Apps and Desktops session. Hopefully, you are not thinking “That’s pretty fast”. If I look at the detailed breakdown of my logon time, you can see it is a mess. Something is happening with my environment to cause things to spike. I want to… Continue reading Logon: Brokering

Begin your XenDesktop blueprint with your users


The users matter first. This is why we have a blueprint for XenDesktop 7 because we want to avoid starting wrong. We want to make sure that the first thing we focus on are the users. Think about it this way, when building a house, one of the first things you have to figure out… Continue reading Begin your XenDesktop blueprint with your users

What are you good at?


I just got back from visiting friends who live about 2-3 hours away. Every time I take this trip, I decide if I will take the interstate or local highways. The interstate gets me there faster, but it is usually more stressful due to the number of people. Even though the interstate is faster, it… Continue reading What are you good at?

Virtual Desktop Resources: Then and Now


Two years ago, I wrote a blog called “Lessons Learned with vCPU allocation”. This was still fairly early in the world of virtual desktops. But with numerous successful projects, we were able to start generating sizing estimates for virtual desktops. We talked about how many vCPUs we should allocate, how many users we expect to… Continue reading Virtual Desktop Resources: Then and Now

An Architect’s Guide to Desktop Virtualization


What does it take to be a desktop virtualization architect? Being able to say “It depends” in twelve different languages is a great start. English (American): It depends English (Australian): It depends English (British): It depends English (Canadian): It depends German: je nachdem Spanish: eso depende French: elle dépend Dutch: het hangt ervan Italian: dipende… Continue reading An Architect’s Guide to Desktop Virtualization

Which Hosted Virtual Desktop Do I Use?


This question has come up quite a few times in the past week, so I thought I would try to add some clarity. It all comes down to people looking to move to XenDesktop 5 from XenDesktop 4. Most of the XenDesktop 4 implementations are using Provisioning Services for single image management. When you create… Continue reading Which Hosted Virtual Desktop Do I Use?

XenDesktop Design Handbook – No Registration Required


A few months ago we released the XenDesktop Design Handbook that contained a collection of reference designs, implementation guides and planning guides. When it was initially released, it had a few items. Over the past couple of months we have included additional items like Bandwidth planning Windows 7 optimization guide VM resource allocation SMB reference… Continue reading XenDesktop Design Handbook – No Registration Required

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