Should VDI Desktops be in same VMWare Servers infrastructure ??

Hi Prit,

I would suggest you keep your server and VDI infrastructures totally separate.

The i/o and other resource requirements are quite different and the criticality of the server environment means you can't afford to have things like VDI VM provisioning etc impacting on server performance and availability.

There's also the question of management. Do the server team want to amnage desktops and if the answer is no, do they want the desktop team impacting the server environemnt?

regards,

Rick

I believe a single Farm should be used

From a running perspective there is not a huge amount of difference between a running XP desktop and a running low utilized Terminal Server.  The VDI difference is not CPU/memory resources, its Disk I/O because you have a much higher power cycle rate on the desktops and booting alot of VM's at once can cause boot storms with huge amounts of Disk I/O.  You normally don't reboot 30-40% of your server envuronment on a daily bases but VDI has a huge potentional do see what, especially in a company with shiftwork type workers.

Your VDI Disk volumes should definitely be seperate from your Server Volumes for that reason but from a management and load balancing perspective a single vCenter Farm with multiple ESX servers running with different resource pools to manage resource contention gives you the best flexibility to manage your hardware patching, and DR environment.  You then also provide different administrative securtiy levels to ensure desktop admins can't power cycle the Domain controllers, or shutdown an ESX host.

Having a single farm also allow you to maximize the overall utilization of the farm without having an underutilized farm of Servers and an onverutilized VDI Farm.

useful info....

there is defo benefits on having a single farm but in our case the server side is not under utilised

our vdi and server volumes are seperate. Yes you can access control within vmware for desktop and server

admin management...but still

i still believe Rick's reponse ( assuming you can affort the cost ..which we have planned for )

is a better , safer and valid directions - i think doing daily "VDI stuff" will impact vmware Server side performance / VC management if they where together.

any other comments on this ?? what are others doing and why ??

i like to collate this and present to our teams in this particular question

regards

prit

With my experience and background I've found it comes down to these main questions:

Will there be multiple groups with administrative management tasks that have power to impact the opposing environments?

Are there different Service Level agreements for the different environments

Are there different Disaster Recovery plans or requirements for each environment.

If you are answering yes to these questions, then usually I would build out an entirely seperate environment (including the SAN) to ensure there is complete isolation and complete flexibility of all components.  Of course, that usually comes with a much higher cost.

If the only really defining factor is there are multiple administrative groups, then its usually a political or process based answer you are looking for, not Technical, since there are easy, technical solutions to that problem.

Managing multiple farms is more cost, more complexity and make it harder during upgrades, typically introduce more challenges around monitoring, Security access, and auditing.  Not to mention products that tie themselves to Virtual Center usually only work against a single Server, therefore you will probably hit an application thats needed to manage both Farm and can't because you are limited to managing the Server side or the Desktop side.

Overall, your problem is NOT technical in nature at all, but rather political in my opinion since one farm or 2 farms from a purely technical level will really have no bearing on the performance of the Farm (since VC is really just the task master and the SAN or the ESX servers themselves do all the work (ie, spinning up 100 VDI desktops using netapp flexclones will cause utilization on the SAN Volume and the ESX CPU/Memory usage...but since there are seperate Clusters in the farm, one cluster of servers being busy does not impact the others.

...for now the answer is Yes

different admins , different sla , different disaster recovery plans , hence we have

a VDI farm and a Server farm , therefore 2 VC

there is a bit of political angle...thanks for the technical info