HP recently released a reference architecture whitepaper about running Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 on VMware vSphere 5.0. The paper "…presents HP’s Reference Architecture for Citrix XenDesktop on VMware with Citrix XenDesktop 5.6, Citrix Provisioning Server 6.1, VMware vSphere 5.0 and VMware vCenter using HP blades and storage. The document will discuss HP’s testing methodology, how testing and characterization was done, and highlight best practices in setting up a reference architecture using Citrix FlexCast capabilities. This is not a step-by-step instruction guide to build a reference architecture. This document will not give installation guidance, or show how to install the software discussed. It will highlight considerations and best practices to help ensure a successful VDI implementation.
The virtual machines were optimized using the PVS image conversion tool and additional optimizations recommended by Citrix in their Windows 7 optimization guide. The virtual machines were configured with Windows 7 x64 SP1 and a single vCPU. Each VM was given 1.5GB of memory. RAID 10 was configured across the DAS storage for the server, and the write cache was set at 3GB thick-zeroed for each user. This configuration was used for all tests. For the medium user workload, VSIMax showed a value of 191 as shown in figure 16. For the VSI Max graphs the X-axis reflects the user count, and the y-axis is ms response times.