Kevin Rubin  May 7, 2012

Where to Start Your XenDesktop Design

There are two recommendations you may wish to follow when it comes to designing a XenDesktop from Citrix Services that are usually overlooked:

  • Key aspects of the design need to be defined
  • The design focus needs to be upon users and never hardware
Although this seems to be quite the obvious, yet these two simple observations are usually ignored.

So what does defining design aspects really mean? Well, what mission statement would you assign to your XenDesktop architecture design? Citirx support offers the recommendation that these aspects of design be business oriented. Prior to design, all requirements should be written down and prioritized. This will helps when progress gets stalled by human analytical paralysis. Priority requirements should help get back on track. Here are some typical aspects to consider:
  • Develop positive user experiences since if no one likes the structure full acceptance and adoption will be quite challenged
  • Risk management needs to be implemented to avoid any single areas of failure – from both individual design components or locations
  • Keep It Simple – all design architectures should never be complex or complicated
  • Make flexible deployment by ensuring the work environment is adaptable to changing quickly
  • All solutions should offer ample support for troubleshooting
Design the XenDesktop environment Citrix Partner with no consideration to hardware aspects, but rather with a nod to users and user groups. The typical approach has been to allocate virtual desktop resources such as assigning 1.5 gb of RAM to a “light” user or 2 gb to normal users. The next move is assigning numbers such as 300 “light” users and 1000 “normal” users. This should not be a chosen design element. Do you actually know what a normal user looks like? What are their application use requirements? What hours do they log in and work? There should never be a class of users that is non-specific.

Instead, examine assignment of resources for specific users and then quantify these, for example:
  • Company Executives – 25 users – OP SYS:Windows 7, 2vCPUs – 6 gb RAM
  • Marketing – 55 users - OP SYS:Windows 7, 2vCPUs – 2 gb RAM
For more information, visit http://www.stratospherenetworks.com/citrix-virtual-desktop-enterprise.html and http://www.stratospherenetworks.com/citrix-virtual-desktop-smb.html
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