DVS Enterprise for Citrix - RA Updates!

We finally have the past several months of work published in our latest RAs. I posted the VRTX + XenDesktop RA earlier  which was part of this release but made it out the door first.

Reference Architecture for DVS Enterprise for Citrix XenDesktop 7: Link

Notable new features included in this release:

 

Intel Ivy Bridge CPU support for all servers (E5-2600 v2) with increased user densities

Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs enable greater performance capability in the existing 12G Dell PowerEdge server line. More cores and faster RAM clocks are now available to get more out of every dollar invested in your VDI deployment. Using Hyper-v 2012 with PVS on XenDesktop 7 we are now seeing user densities of up to 200 concurrent per compute host! It should be said that we tested with the new 1866MHz DIMMs and found no benefit to justify the cost increase over the 1600MHz DIMMs.

 

Dell PowerEdge M IO Aggregator added to extended SCL replacing M8024-K modules

The IO Aggregator modules are used in the A frabic of the M620 blade-based solutions for 10Gb connectivity (internal + uplink). They can be used to provide 20Gb of iSCSI bandwidth to each blade or can be sliced into virtual NICs for LAN traffic, using NPAR, for fiber channel solutions.

 

Update to Dell Compellent Tier 1 scaling and configuration (SCOS 6.3)

SCOS 6.3 brings with it some exciting performance enhancements to the Dell Compellent SC8000 controller architecture. We saw a 200% performance improvement over the legacy 6.2 code bringing the DVS recommended Compellent array to support upwards of 2000 users. Keep in mind that this is pure SAS, no SSD or fancy flash, and that’s not the top end for this array either. We’ll be pushing this array further in the months to come. This update adds 2 additional shelves to the existing 1000 user offering and is capable of booting them all on-demand in less than an hour.

 

Dell Wyse Cloud Client updates

Citrix Ready and certified for use with HDX to achieve the best end user experience possible.

 

Dell PowerEdge VRTX offering for ROBO: LINK

Dell’s award-winning and industry recognized consolidated infrastructure used to host up to 500 VDI users at a price that can’t be beat.

 

Shared graphics (vSGA) on NVIDIA Grid cards: LINK

We’ve expanded our graphic acceleration offering to include vSGA (shared mode) in addition to vDGA (pass-through mode) on VMware vSphere. vSGA offers a higher per compute host user density by virtualizing the GPU cores.

 

Microsoft Lync 2013 test results and sizing: LINK

Unified Communications in VDI can be tricky. Dell DVS has put Lync 2013 through its paces in the XenDesktop environment and demonstrates what can be expected from a sizing and performance perspective.