Hi everyone!
I am a VMware VCP with several years form Vcenter and Storage experience with 5.1. We have a small siatellite using ESS Plus on 2 clusters. One for about 30 servers using VMware VSA, and one for VDI. We are looking to virtualize 30 windows 8 desktops.
I recently did a beta test of Citrix VDI In a box as I was interested in the no SAN needed functionality. While it looked promising initially, it completely flopped when trying to run on multiple vlan's. Too many issues with Citrix VIAB unfortunately.
So I want to stick with Vmware. Again, this would be for about 30 clients and I want to make this as minimalist as possible like VIAB as the site does not have any on-site IT support for everything would be managed remotely via vpn.
We have configured the two HP DL 360 hosts with 128 gb ram, each 2 procs and 8 15k sas drives each striped in raid 5 across 7 drives and one hot stand-by drive giving us about 1200 peak iops on each host. As most staff are just ms office and internet users, iops are not an issue.
There would be no central storage in this two host cluster, so I want to run the vm's using direct storage, but would like to use HA for fail over to the second host. I dont know if configuring a second VMware VSA metro cluster is the way to go for VDI but would consider it if it gave us the no san functionality.
The site has access to a 4 drive Qnap NAS but iops are not great so it's really more for small stuff.
I set up the workstations VLAN on the NSA sonicwall, and will be running all servers and esxi hosts on one vlan and all workstations on theiir own separate vlan. I already have the windows 8 vm built using vmware best practices in removing unneeded services.
Can anyone give me some pointers to get me started on this VDI project?
Thank you in advance!
Peter