Cisco CVD completed with Hyper-V and XenDesktop!
I love Friday news. Its even better when I get to announce something that others havent done yet! Cisco has recently wrapped up testing with their UCS platform using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Citrix XenDesktop 4 on top of NetApp SANs. I love how thorough these CVD guides are! And for those of you that dont know about UCS, check it out.
The memory management is especially cool and you can stick in a ridiculous amount of memory at a lower cost. NetApp SANs I especially like due to its ability to intelligently cache commonly used VHD blocks and feed them out of flash memory. That means you only go back to disk for what is different and unique, thus you maximize throughput.
I noticed though that they used W7 64bit guests. While they probably didnt notice it as they had sufficiently high statically configured RAM, we noticed in our testing that 64bit guests consume a lot more RAM than 32 bit guests. In practise, I would recommend you use 32bit especially with dynamic memory starting at 512MB RAM instead unless you have a pressing reason to use 64bit such as app support or high memory requirements.
Can you imagine what SP1 will do for this CVD? :)
Happy reading