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Implementing VDI for anywhere access

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: In this article, we'll tell you how to deploy VDI using VMware. VDI, to reiterate briefly, places a 'virtualized' desktop on a remote central server, instead of the local storage of a physical desktop PC. It's accessed using a client, which in case of VMware is called VMware View.

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The client doesn't stress the resources of the local machine, but accesses the desktop from remote server. A user will feel as if the desktop is running locally (if it's on a LAN). All the user's work will be saved on the remote server.

As a result, the same user can run multiple virtual desktops on the same machine, without compromising on performance. As a result, the local machine doesn't need to be very powerful, and won't require an hardware upgrade for a long time. In this sort of virtualization, the VDI solution is running on a central server, and all desktops are hosted on a central storage.

You provide each user with a unique ID and password to access the desktop. Another type of VDI implementation involves storing the virtual desktop image on the local desktop itself. It doesn't connect to a central server. If it's connected to a network, synchronizations takes place. The drawback of this setup is that it relies on the local hardware resources. We'll only concentrate on the first type of VDI implementation in this article.

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Requirements:

We used the following for our VDI implementation:

Hardware Servers: An Intel Xeon E7-4870 based server with 40 cores and 128 GB RAM for VDI; An Intel Dunnington based 24-core server with 8 GB RAM for Controller.

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Storage: EMC's VNXE 31100 Unified Storage (reviewed in the last issue).

VDI Software: VMware ESXi Server, VMWare vSphere, VMWare View Connection Manager, VMWare View client

OS: Microsoft Windows 2008 Standard Server with the latest updates, running ADS, DHCP, and DNS services.

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The Setup

We used VMware ESXi server on 2 Intel based servers, as described above. These had 4 Quad core Xeon processors with 256 GB RAM connected in a cluster mode for load balancing. We then took the Dell PowerEdge Server and made it the controller.

The controller server runs VMware vSphere Client on top of Windows 2008 Standard Server. Note that you have to assign a static IP to the controller before installing the VMware vSphere Client. The storage box was fine-tuned to host all the VMs that we created, using the VMFS file system. We connected the storage box over iSCSI interface @ 1Gbps on an isolated network. We created a VMFS volume of 500 GB and dedicated it to the virtual infrastructure as a storage pool.

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