Another difference:

• The 2000 desktop Proven Solution puts all the Linked Clone storage in a R10 Pool.
• The 1000 desktop Proven Solution uses RAID5 Pools. 

I've been told by my Partner TC that nobody can find any record yet of a View5 reference architecture for Block.

I would still love to hear opinions on why such a vast difference in spindle-count and FAST Cache between the View 4.5 Ref Architecture and the View 5 Ref Architecture (NFS). 

Hi,

I found another WP speaking about View 4.6 + NFS architcture which is capable of scaling to 2000 users by using a single view server. http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Basics/White_Paper/h8283-view-vnx-vsphere-psg.pdf?mtcs=ZXZlbnRUeXBlPUttQ2xpY2tDb250ZW50RXZlbnQsZG9jdW1lbnRJZD0wOTAxNDA2NjgwNWYxYjBhLGRvY3VtZW50VHlwZT1wZGYsbmF2ZU5vZGU9MGIwMTQwNjY4MDQ0ZjY4Yl9Hcmlk

The disk configuration here is 25 SAS disks, 9 NL-SAS and 3 EFD drives in VNX 5300. Quite interesting.

Yep, I found that one after my first post.  Digging into it, the tests they show were for 500 Win7 desktops.

They had 2x EFD's supporting FAST Cache and 15 15K spindles supporting Replicas AND Linked Clones.   There were other drives in the system for user data, infrastructure VMs, etc.

I have been told by EMC VDI soution guy that block storage is expected to have better performance than NFS. Why do they put 195 spindles and 15 EFD on VNX5700? they said they were not trying to do the sizing but finish the reference architecture test. Undoubtly, you can find much better performance data on this oversized configuration. I tended to believe you can count on VNX 5300 configuration to support 1000 users.