It may be time to take another look at XenServer, folks.
The new PVS Accelerator feature caches the PVS stream, drastically reducing the CPU and Bandwidth required. For XenDesktop PVS-based VDI… this would solve a lot of boot-storm issues and makes the “Pod” configuration a great option.
Goodbye hypervisor tax, in other words.
Source: What’s New in XenServer 7.1 – Part III | Citrix Blogs
My advice- always go with the Hypervisor you know you can support, but if you have a large scale deployment of VDI- it may be very much worth your time to learn how to support XenServer in addition to vSphere ESX.
Why? Because you can put your “Control” layer, now including your PVS servers, on your hardened and HA VMware cluster… and deploy cheaper XenServer pods for your VDI- which doesn’t require HA and would now not really need to have PVS servers on the same XenServer cluster since the data being accessed could be cached. The implications of this in a multi-datacenter or Cold Recovery DR environment are actually really big.
This. Is. Awesome.
