Citrix and EMC help customers simplify their environment by delivering a dynamic and integrated infrastructure of desktop management, unified storage, data protection, and security technologies to deliver improved performance, availability, and protection for desktops, applications, and data. One of the main stays throughout EMC’s XenDesktop solution portfolio is the VNX Family of Unified Storage Systems and Software that provide customers a sound infrastructure for building out and deploying XenDesktop solutions. The VNX Family has over 15 Product of the Year awards and has been an integral force in EMC being named #1 In Storage for Key Applications by IDC including being optimized for Desktop Virtualization environments.

EMC VNX Family of Unified Storage

The family is comprised of two series: VNXe series and VNX series.

• ŸThe VNXe series represents the entry point of the VNX family
• The VNX series is our midrange platform that combines the capabilities of EMCs CLARiiON (FC) and Celerra (NAS) platforms into a single storage offering.

These are storage solutions that will enable you to start up a Citrix XenDesktop environment with ease and simplicity while delivering the requisite power, scale, and efficiency to handle the most demanding Citrix XenDesktop implementations across users, devices, and applications.

EMC VNXe Series for Citrix XenDesktop

The VNXe Series is EMC’s entry level, IP based storage architecture designed specifically to be a cost effective solution for small and medium businesses where traditional storage admin skills aren’t always available. With VNXe, simplicity and ease of use are key.

The VNXe platform was designed and streamlined for the IT generalist managing virtual environments and is an ideal platform for Citrix XenDesktop deployments with its quad-core performance and support for Solid State (Flash) Drives that help deliver high transactional performance for a defined set of data, like VDI boot volumes. Some of the VNXe features that make it simple and efficient for Citrix XenDesktop include:

• ŸApplication and hypervisor-aware wizards that let you configure storage with just a few clicks enabling you to rapidly provision storage for hundreds of users
• ŸAn IP-based multi-protocol array with CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI and can easily scale to meet the capacity needs of any small to medium size business running Citrix
• ŸBuilt-in efficiency technologies like snapshots and replication capabilities and
• ŸSupports all the leading server virtualization hypervisors
• ŸAll VNXe platforms support 2.5 inch drives that drive more performance and capacity per rack Unit. And with the support of 3TB NL-SAS drives, you can save rack space and lower cooling and power requirements.
• ŸOther features include support for 10Gbit Ethernet, a powerful SAS back end, and support for up to 150 drives

EMC VNX Series for Citrix XenDesktop

VNX represents the convergence of EMC’s CLARiiON and Celerra platforms into a single modular unified storage offering. The VNX Series includes 5 different models including a Fiber Channel only array, an all Flash Array, and platforms with high bandwidth capabilities.

The VNX series is powerful and is optimized for delivering the kind of performance, efficiency, and scalability expected in a Citrix XenDesktop environment that may be supporting thousands of virtual desktops. Also, its use of Flash drives combined with EMC’s FAST Suite technology makes it ideal for absorbing the high level of IO’s that typically occur during intensive XenDesktop “storms” such as boot and login storms and virus scans. From a feature perspective, the VNX Series is:

• A multi-protocol platform supporting FCoE, FC, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS and object storage extensions
• Supports all the leading hypervisors and scales to 1000 drives in the VNX7500  
• Other VNX features that will help optimize XenDesktop storage efficiency and performance include:
  • ŸPool Expansion Rebalancing
  • Load Balancing Within a Tier
  • ŸBlock based snapshots enabling you to repurpose data without disrupting the production environments
  • Support for mixed RAID types within a storage pool
  • Flexible RAID options for pools that allow you to choose different RAID options for increased efficiency

EMC FAST Suite for Citrix XenDesktop

If VNX is the ideal storage infrastructure platform for Citrix XenDesktop, then the EMC FAST Suite is its fuel as it enables VNX to leverage Flash Drives to improve performance and maximize storage efficiency for Citrix XenDesktop environments at any scale.

The FAST Suite consists of two components - FAST Cache which and FAST Virtual Pool or FAST VP. 

Starting with FAST Cache - essentially this technology copies the hottest data to Flash as an extension of DRAM cache enabling Flash to be used as a secondary cache between the disks and the DRAM cache. This provides a real-time performance boost by ensuring that the hottest data is served from the highest-performing Flash drives for as long as needed. In doing so, FAST Cache provides an immediate performance benefit to the busiest workloads (like a Citrix boot storm) by holding a large percentage of the most frequently used data in high performance FLASH drives. And while FAST Cache helps response time to sudden activity on data stored on spinning disks, it will also help you reduce spindle count and related desktop virtualization costs.

The FAST VP technology is also worth noting as a solution that pertains mostly to your application data only. It moves that data across drives or between tiers automatically either manually or through a policy-driven scheduler. In essence, FAST VP auto-tiering is optimizing drive utilization through a relative ranking of the data over time.

In essence, for Citrix XenDesktop environments: 

1. FAST Cache accelerates performance and is designed to absorb I/O “storms” with XenDesktop…whereas…
2. FAST VP helps auto tiering of mixed application data to the right disk at the right time

Together they deliver a policy-based fully automated strategy for the achieving the highest system performance at the lowest cost attainable simultaneously across your Citrix environment. Customers that deploy the FAST Suite require far fewer spinning drives while allowing the deployment of Flash without increasing complexity and costs. This lets you focus more on capacity and service management, not on disk technologies.