Designing virtual desktop infrastructure can be complex, there are many moving parts, it’s a business critical application, especially when done at scale. In a traditional infrastructure the consequences of miscalculations can be significant. Fortunately Nutanix takes away the risk and the complications by providing a standard building block approach, pay as you grow, linear scalability and a known quantity of desktops for the infrastructure. Nutanix and Citrix have now announced the Citrix Validated Solution (CVS) for Hosted Virtual Desktops and Hosted Shared Desktops. This provides a complete end to end software and infrastructure solution that is fully supported, tested and validated by both Citrix and Nutanix. Nutanix is one of the few vendors in the world that currently has a validated solution. This article will give you some of the highlights and links to the full details.

What makes the Nutanix platform so great for VDI is it’s density, very low power consumption, and high performance. Usually in traditional architecture these would be mutually exclusive. The Citrix Validated Architecture is based on the Nutanix 3060 platform, which consists of 20 core Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge CPU processors (2.8GHz), 256GB RAM and a mix of SSD and HDD storage. You can have up to 4 nodes in a 2U chassis called a block (as it’s a building block), and typical power consumption for the 4 nodes in a block combined is around 1KW. 

CVS is a fully tested end-to-end design for all hardware, software and services that delivers a complete Desktop Virtualization solution. It is based on Nutanix and Citrix best practices and reduces the risk of deployment delays, delivers a better user experience and a higher return-on-investment. The CVS has been installed, configured, tested and verified by the Citrix Consulting team and the tool used for the validation was Login VSI. The CVS solution covers two desktop tops:

• Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD) for up to 1,000 individual XenDesktop Hosted Virtual Desktops running Windows 7 Enterprise x64. This configuration delivers 1000 desktops at less than 3W power consumption. When you consider that the Ivy Bridge processors from Intel have GPU built in, this is a great configuration for knowledge workers and power users. 

• Hosted Shared Desktops (HSD) for up to 1,000 individual user sessions running XenDesktop Hosted Shared Desktops on Windows Server 2012 R2 Remote Desktop Session (RDS) Hosts. This configuration delivers 1000 shared desktops for approximately 1W of power consumption. The shared desktops still benefit from the native Intel Ivy Bridge GPU capabilities, but this is more targeted at task workers. 

For further information regarding the Citrix Validated Solution I recommend you review the Nutanix CVS Announcement, the Tech Guide, and check out the Solution Brief.

Final Word

The Nutanix platform combined with Citrix and wrapped up into a simple and thoroughly validated solution changes the economics of virtual desktop infrastructure. Not only do you save a lot of operational time and cost, but also capital costs, all with reduced risk. Nutanix can further enhance the offering with the VDI Assurance Program, that provides a guaranteed performance per desktop, and a purchasing model that is also per desktop (minimum packs of desktops apply). This really allows for virtual desktops to become mainstream.

If you’re a VMware customer and wish to run VMware View, Nutanix has a reference architecture for this as well. Check out the Nutanix Desktop Virtualization Kit – Includes Large-scale VDI Reference Architecture with VMware View, VMware View on Nutanix: Reference Architecture and VMware View on Nutanix: Best Practices. As always comments and feedback are appreciated.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.