VMWare View Computer Lab

T

Terillius

Gawd
Joined
Feb 24, 2006
Messages
715
I'm looking at doing a student lab with VMWare view and I'm not sure about the server requirements. I have salesmen recommending some pretty serious hardware, but I'm wondering if it is really necessary.

I will have 30 thin clients that will run internet browser and MS office. I'm looking at a sales quote - 12 cores, 48GB RAM, and 6 x 300GB drives. Seriously?
 
Terillius said:
I'm looking at doing a student lab with VMWare view and I'm not sure about the server requirements. I have salesmen recommending some pretty serious hardware, but I'm wondering if it is really necessary.

I will have 30 thin clients that will run internet browser and MS office. I'm looking at a sales quote - 12 cores, 48GB RAM, and 6 x 300GB drives. Seriously?
Click to expand...

How many of these servers were you quoted for?
 
Just one to run the 30 clients. Seems like the storage space is especially excessive since there will only be one image and I don't need them to be stateful.

I'm thinking two quad-core servers with 16GB each and 8 x 36GB drives. Build in redundancy and increase spindle count.
 
Terillius said:
I'm thinking two quad-core servers with 16GB each and 8 x 36GB drives. Build in redundancy and increase spindle count.
Click to expand...

Wow, they still make 36GB drives?

If it is like anything else in the real world - the View deployment will be a success and either a) you'll wish you bought more so you could run more or b) you'll be forced to run more on the "right" sized deployment you want to purchase now.

Also - if you expect them to all boot at once, put a pair of flash drives in as well (CBRC will help offset this need tremendously though).

Remember, you are replacing the hardware of 30 computers. Would you put out a brand new PC with less than 1 core, 1GB RAM and about 10 GB of storage? Not unless you want a bunch of angry users.

Also remember (if you don't already have a View deployment) the minimum purchase starts at 100 desktops. You can buy in 10 packs after that, but 100 is the minimum.

The build you were quoted may seem excessive, but honestly it's not something you want to skimp on. One sure-fire way to kill a VDI rollout is poor performance.
 
You can't easily buy smaller CPUs...so 12 cores is about it these days. The RAM is right. I wouldn't go one bit less on disk. It's not about space, it's about IOPS. 30 VDI clients can easily hit 1K IOPS if they boot up or all launch apps close to the same time....and you won't get 1K IOPS out of those drives but you should be fine most of the time.
 
My question is why are you doing View for 30 clients? Is this a PoC for a larger deployment?
 
Memory and IOPs are your biggest concern. I would suggest the P20 or P25 Wyse Zero clients.
 
If capital expense is your driving factor, there is no chance a 30 VDI deploy will save you money over buying each user a workstation. It's unlikely your Op Ex will be cheaper either at that scale.

We looked at doing around a 30-200 VDI deployment (to see what scale made sense) and if we wanted decent performance (say 1080p youtube to work) it was going to cost vastly more than desktops - At today's price/performance we can't even consider VDI save a few single-task workstations and then the scale isn't there.
 
VDI is never about capital cost....not when you can buy a cheap Dell workstation for $400.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top