Egenera, the company which provides cloud-computing-in-a-box software called PAN Manager has released two whitepapers detailing a reference architecture for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) running on top of Dell or Fujitsu hardware.
PAN Manager is software which pools server, network, and storage resources providing management capabilities by virtualizing I/O and networking and providing simplified server re-configuration, availability and disaster recovery services. The solution provides what Egenera calls a Processing Area Network (PAN). PAN Manager is Citrix Ready validated and is offered on three platforms: Dell blade servers, Fujitsu Primergy servers and Egeneras own BladeFrame systems.
The first whitepaper is titled: Reference Architecture for Desktop Virtualisation & Converged Infrastructure Using Citrix XenDesktop & Egenera PAN Manager Implemented on Dell PowerEdge Hardware Platform and contains 58 pages. The second whitepaper is called: Reference Architecture for Desktop Virtualisation & Converged Infrastructure Using Citrix XenDesktop & Egenera PAN Manager Implemented on Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX900 Hardware Platform and contains 57 pages.
Both documents provide a reference architecture for a PAN Manager infrastructure which provides virtual desktops running on Citrix XenDesktop, running on top of Dell/Fujitsu hardware. The reference architecture is designed to provide up to 1000 users, running Windows XP professional and MS Office 2007, provided by Citrix XenServer, XenDesktop and Provisioning Server.
Covered sections:
- Desktop Virtualisation and PAN Manager, which details what desktop virtualization is, what PAN Manager is and how it integrates.
- An Overview of the Solution Components, detailing the PAN Manager hardware requirements, the hardware models from Dell/Fujitsu used, and details about XenDesktop.
- Sizing Guidelines for the Reference Architecture, which provides guidelines to sizing the VDI environment. Depening on the type of user: Light, Medium, Heavy or very Heavy guidelines are provided for Memory, Host Server Sizing and SAN.
- Reference Architecture, providing a solution that can support up to 1000 users desktops as VMs, with High Availability and Disaster Recovery included.
- Ordering Guide, which gives an overview of the used hardware for reference when this hardware needs to be ordered.
- Dell/Fujitsu PAN System Compatibility, detailing the supported Operating Systems and Storage Systems.