Citrix XenDesktop on VMware vSphere 4 Reference Architecture

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has many components as well as many different vendor technologies that make up the architecture. Two of the most common technologies utilized are based on the VMware vSphere product portfolio and Citrix XenDesktop. While some higher education institutions prefer to stick to a single vendor VDI strategy, other institutions that already have a virtualization strategy in place and may need to integrate different VDI technologies on top of the existing virtualization platform. To this end, the VDI solution described is a hybrid solution comprised of Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix Provisioning Server and VMware vSphere 4.0.1. This hybrid solution of VDI technologies comprises of two fundamental layers, a virtualization layer and the physical hardware on which it resides. These two layers are described as follows:

Physical Architecture

Physical Architecture
The hardware used to make up the physical architecture consists of the following hardware: Two Dell PowerEdge R710 Servers for VMware ESX 4.01 hosts. One Dell PowerEdge R300 Server as a dedicated VMware vCenter server with View composer. One Dell PowerConnect 5448 network switch for LAN connectivity. One Dell PowerConnect 6248 network switch for iSCSI SAN connectivity. One Dell | EqualLogic PS6000XV with sixteen 450GB (15,000 RPM) Hard Drives. Various models of Laptop, Desktop and Workstation hardware to simulate the manual as well as automated application testing.

Virtual Architecture
Built on top of the physical architecture is the logical/virtual architecture. It is comprised of the following components/tiers: Presentation Tier: The Presentation Tier hosts two virtual machines running Citrix XenApp. These virtual machines publish the Internet Explorer application to allow the users to access the architecture and test the applications. Connection Tier: The Connection Tier houses the back-end infrastructure applications and services as follows: View Connection Server: This virtual machine manages the simulated end-user requests for a virtual machine desktop.

View Manager: The View Manager is a component of the Connection Server that provides a management interface to provision, deploy and manage the desktop infrastructure. View Composer: The View Composer is the component that integrates vCenter with View Manager. Active Directory Domain Controller (AD): This virtual machine allows for the centralized management of both infrastructure access, authentication, password and profile management for the simulated end-users. This server also provides network name resolution and dynamic TCPIP address allocation for the infrastructure. SQL Database Server: A physical server or virtual machine running Microsoft SQL Server houses the various database used by vCenter and View Composer. Desktop Tier An additional Dell PowerEdge R710 (ESX 4.0.1) hosts the Windows XP Desktops, pre-loaded with the applications that the simulated end-users will use.

Virtual Architecture

For more information see the whitepaper.