In July 2010 Citrix and Microsoft released a technical white paper detailing a reference architecture for a VDI environment combining Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 running on top of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and Dell hardware. This end to end solution provided by Dell is called Dell Virtual Remote Desktop (VRD). The paper is called Dell Virtual Remote Desktop Reference Architecture and contains 27 pages.
The document covers three types of configurations:
• A 250 user configuration, minimal hardware footprint, simple design and provides basic functionality.
• A 500 user configuration, flexible design and meets requirements of small to medium businesses.
• A 1000 user configuration, the full feature virtualization solution for larger deployments.
The Dell VRD reference architecture was validated using two tools:
• Login VSI from Login Consultants
• Auto-IT workload scripts developed by Dell Engineering to represent a knowledge worker workload.
“…Choosing a Dell Virtual Remote Desktop solution means that customers can take advantage of a tested reference architecture, sized for specific user profiles and use cases, to deliver desktop virtualization and session virtualization capabilities to their end users without the time and money of validating the solution for themselves in their own business. This can effectively reduce the overall cost of deployment by a significant amount as planning and sizing the deployment can often cost just as much as the deployment itself…”