VDI Project - Hypervisor war (part.3)

· 2 min read

VDI Project – Not only a XenDesktop project (part.1)
VDI Project – The framework (part.2)
VDI Project – Hypervisor war (part.3)
VDI Project – Desktops and applications delivery (part.4)
VDI Project – User Environment Manager (part.5)

Cool title right ? If you click on it then this title was just perfect 🙂

Within my desktop industrialization and virtualization project, I had of course the first layer to analyze : Hypervizors. What is installed, what can be challenge, why bringing a change to this existing layer ? And which product I should push against the one already present ? This is the announce war, if there is some Hyper-V or Vmware I should try to push XenServer (I’m a Citrix preacher guy) and on any case, I should change everything to show I’ve been here and mark the path of changes…. Nope I didn’t, this is 100% vSphere deployed full packed with a very good team handling the infrastructure and a lot of processes and work-flow already running, so I don’t see any advantage for my customer (and for me) to change what’s working and in place.

Changing an installed hypervizor on a large deployment would mean :

  • Changing / adapting processes
  • Industrialization rebuilding
  • Engineer and administrators teams training
  • Heavy and long migration (V2V..)
  • Lost of focus regarding what bring me first on this “Desktop” project
  • Maybe reduction of administrators / engineer

As I mentioned in the part 1 & 2 of this blog, in fact I didn’t had to test anything because the choice have already be made. I would have like to make my own benchmark test and comparison but limited time and specific politics in this project were in the game.

If you want to go further on this subject then I encourage you to read Project VRC – Phase II version 2.0 white paper full of very interesting information. Now I need to keep in mind this architecture piece I would have to address, I don’t know bunch of thing about vmware vSphere, I will use some help on that subject by some other expert.

The announce war didn’t happen and I’m very disappointed about that, I would have like to make my own test and publish result I got from an extreme VDI benchmark. I will do it, sooner or later !