HP has released a paper titled: HP Reference Architecture for Client Virtualization. The paper, which contains 43 pages describes how to setup Citrix XenDesktop on top of VMware vSphere 5 running on top of HP Hardware and using HP Storage. The document focuses on leveraging the Citrix Flexcast delivery technology of hosted or streamed desktops.
The reference architecture was tested using Login Virtual Session Indexer(VSE) version 3.5. The server under test was an HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680 processors, Hyper-Threading was on, BIOS settings were for high performance, and 256 GB RAM. The server was configured with direct-attached storage using the HP Smart Array P721m controller and the HP D2700 Storage enclosure. A P721m was placed in the server, and using the SAS manager within the Onboard Administrator, 6 physicals drives of the D2700 are assigned to the blade server. The ACU (Array Configuration Utility) was used to set the drives in a RAID10 configuration and the drives are configured in the vSphere server as an additional data store to hold the PVS write cache files.
The paper contains the following sections:
- Executive Summary
- Client virtualization and HP
- Reference architecture components
- HP Bladesystem
- HP Proliant server
- HP Storage
- User data storage
- HP Virtual Connect Flex-10
- HP 12500 Series switches
- HP Thin Clients
- Recommended services for HP client virtualization reference architectures
- Citrix XenDesktop
- VMware vSphere
- Reference Architecture overview
- The Reference Architecture testing
- The non-persistent model with Flexcast
- The persistent model with Flexcast
- HP, Citrix and VMWare – better together
- Summary
Citrix XenDesktop when integrated with HP BladeSystem, HP Storage and VMware vSphere provides a unique set of virtual desktop delivery models including: virtual desktop Infrastructure; hosted-shared desktops, client-hosted desktop virtualization and application virtualization. These models can be combined to provide optimal user experiences supporting a diverse set of user needs while maximizing the efficient use of the infrastructure.