Designing FMA for your XenDesktop^? deployment

While we know the FMA that makes up your XenDesktop technology in detail, it critical for you to know how to design the FMA for your XenDesktop deployment. FMA for a XenDesktop version remains the same globally, yet each enterprise according to its business requirements will have its own design for FMA. To make this designing simpler, faster, and more effective, Citrix has devised an automated system called Project Accelerator. Project Accelerator extensively covers all the possible specifications that are required for a XenDesktop deployment for the chosen requirements. Working with Project Acceleration for designing your FMA deployment should be your first step toward building your deployment plan.

Project Accelerator

Project Accelerator is a web solution that is available for all Citrix customers. It lets you specify all the high level steps, and the real time values for completing your XenDesktop deployment. It's an easy to use web based tool with limited documentation, which is available online. In this section, we'll cover the vast set of options and parameters that come with the latest version of the tool (that is 0.7). This understanding will help you in becoming familiar with the tool, and it will help you in using it in your XenDesktop deployment planning.

The Project Accelerator is pided into three phases as follows:

• Assess
• Design
• Result

The assess phase

The assess phase lets you provide the custom business requirements for desktop virtualization. It involves specifying the various types of information in five sections as follows:

It resembles the steps that you would follow in reality for resource creation and allocation to user groups in XenDesktop deployment.

1. Define Organization: It specifies the business priorities when deploying the XenDesktop solution.
2. Define Project: It specifies the XD version, the licensing, and the scope of support/consultation.
3. Define User Groups: It specifies the user group along with the number of users, personalization, security, mobility, the workload of the applications used by the users, and the desktop loss criticality.
4. Define Applications: It specifies the list of the applications along with their high level resource requirements, the application setup complexity, and the usage of the application by other companies.
5. Link Apps to User Groups: This final step specifies all the user's groups that would be using the defined business applications.

At the end of the assessment phase, you'll be automatically presented with Sizing & Deployment Plan and a Recommended Architecture based on the basic details. To make your design more realistic, you can choose the option of stepping into the design phase.

The design phase

The design phase consists of three steps. This phase gathers the information to profile the user's environments so that your design becomes more accurate and closer to real time. As in real time, the parameters in the later steps are dependent on the previous steps, and if you change the decision values in step 1, then you will need to re-define the relevant data points in the later steps.

Following is the screenshot of design phase options to be defined:

We'll learn the design phase steps along with the possible values here:

1. FlexCast: This will lead you to the decision on FlexCast model for users. You can choose among the FlexCast models from the following. For the sake of this content, I am choosing the Pooled VDI mode, which will affect the options in the later steps.
   • Assigned VDI
   • Hosted Shared
   • Local VM
   • On-Demand Apps
   • Pooled VDI
   • Remote PC
2. User Groups: This defines the user's device/end point capabilities (a decision based on Primary End Point) and their business application delivery modes (decision based on application deployment method). Depending on the FlexCast model, chosen in step 1, you'll see various options, which you will need to specify here. Relatively, the On-Demand Apps mode has the least user level parameters. Most of the parameters that are available for the other FlexCast models are as follows:
   • The user's Primary End Point can be one of these: Corporate Desktops, Corporate Laptops, Personal Devices, Shared PCs or Thin Clients.
   • vCPU per Desktop: Select from a range of 1 to 8 cores.
   • RAM per Desktop: Select from a range of 1 to 8 GB.
   • Steady State IOPS per User: A value of IOPS.
   • User Profile Type: Citrix user profiles, roaming, and others.
   • User Security and Safety Policy: You will specify the XenDesktop Baseline, the policy to be used for the WAN users of XenDesktop, and also specify XenDesktop's Low Security & High Security Policies.
   • Applications: Installed on the base image, On-Demand App (Dedicated Server), On-Demand App (Shared Server), and Deliver with the Microsoft App-V.
   • Desktop Image Selection: New.
   • Desktop Operating Systems: Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.
   • Desktop Image Size: Specify the value in GBs (in other words, it is the size of the base disk).
   • Desktop Cache Size: Specify the value in GBs (forms the differential disk). Usually, this will be in the 2-25 GB range.
   • Computer Policy: You will specify the XenDesktop Baseline for the WAN user, the XenDesktop LAN or XenDesktop WAN, and the XenDesktop Low Security & XenDesktop High Security Policies.
3. DataCenter: This step involves defining your data center resources, which would be available for use on your virtual desktops and on the XenDesktop controller. It includes the hardware resources of the hosts, the storage, and the operating system requirements for the controller, applications and their sizes.

   The following is a quick list of the decisions involved which should be considered when choosing the possible options:

   • On-Demand Apps:
     • On-Demand Apps Operating System: Choose one of the supported server operating systems listed as follows:
       • Windows Server 2008 R2
       • Windows Server 2012
       • Windows Server 2012 R2
     • On-Demand Apps Profile Type: This refers to the type of user profiles to retain the user-specific application settings. Supported profile types include the following:
       • Local
       • Mandatory
       • Roaming
       • Citrix User Profile
       • Other
     • On-Demand Apps Image Size: It's the size of image that includes the operating system and the applications that are to be installed. Usually specified in GBs, Citrix recommendation is 60 GB for Windows Server 2012.
     • On-Demand Apps Cache Size: Any changes made to On-Demand Apps server during normal operations are stored within the cache and cleared during a reboot. Cache size must be large enough to contain the changes, should be specified in GBs and have a default value of 40 GB .
   • Control:
     • Image Controllers:
       • Preferred Imaging Solution: PVS, MCS and Manual.
       • For MCS, you can specify its Storage Type among Shared CIFS, Shared NFS, Shared iSCSI or Share FC.
     • For PVS, you can specify its PVS server network capacity (1 or 10 Gbps) and the Storage Type for its image, and these can be Local PVS Server Disk, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI per PVS, FC per PVS, Shared iSCSI or Shared FC.
   • Hardware:
     • VDI Pool Hardware Design:
       • VDI Pool Hypervisor: XenServer, Hyper-V, and vSphere
       • VDI Cores per Server: A range of 8-24 Cores
       • VDI RAM per Server: A range of 32-256 GBs
       • VDI Resource Pool Storage Location: Shared
       • VDI Resource Pool Storage Type: NFS and iSCSI/FC
     • Shared Pool Hardware Design:
       • Shared Pool Hypervisor: XenServer, Hyper-V, vSphere
       • Hosted Shared Pool Cores per Server: A range of 8-24 Cores
       • Hosted Shared Pool RAM: A range of 32-256 GBs
       • Hosted Shared Resource Pool Image Size: A value in GBs
       • Hosted Shared Resource Pool Storage Location: Shared
       • Hosted Shared Resource Pool Storage Type: NFS and iSCSI/FC
     • Control Pool Hardware Design:
       • Control Pool Hypervisor (Control servers): XenServer, Hyper-V, vSphere
       • Control Cores per Server: A range of 8-48 Cores
       • Control Hardware (RAM): A range of 32-320 GBs
       • Control Resource Pool Storage Location: Shared
       • Control Resource Pool Storage Type: NFS and iSCSI/FC

Results along with an example

For example, I choose to deliver the Microsoft Office application suite to a group of 10 users through a pool of 10 virtual Windows 7 Desktops. I would deliver these desktops to the users from remote locations as well.

The results will give you two pages: Sizing & Deployment Plan and Recommended Architecture. One can further customize these two pages and make any changes that are needed and then export them in order to share them with the business heads and management officials so that they can work on an implementation proposal.

Here is how the resulting Sizing & Deployment Plan page looks:

Sizing and deployment plan

The following image displays the resulting Recommended Architecture page:

Recommended architecture