Technical Report Best Practices for Microsoft Hyper-V with Citrix XenDesktop VDI on NetApp Storage Rob Briggs, Pavel Lobanov, NetApp February 2012 | TR-4042 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................. 4 1.1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY............................................................................................................................................4 1.2 IMPLEMENTING BEST PRACTICES .......................................................................................................................4 1.3 INTENDED AUDIENCE .............................................................................................................................................5 1.4 DOCUMENT ROADMAP ...........................................................................................................................................5 2 NETAPP STORAGE BEST PRACTICES............................................................................................... 6 2.1 AN INTRODUCTION TO STORAGE IN A VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE ..............................................................6 2.2 THE VALUE OF MULTIPROTOCOL STORAGE ARRAYS ......................................................................................6 2.3 THE 80/20 RULE .......................................................................................................................................................6 2.4 NETAPP STORAGE BEST PRACTICES...................................................................................................................7 2.5 STORAGE SIZING BEST PRACTICES…..............................................................................................................12 2.6 STORAGE ARCHITECTURE BEST PRACTICES...................................................................................................13 2.7 ADDITIONAL NETAPP SOFTWARE.......................................................................................................................16 3 HYPER-V STORAGE NETWORK DESIGN….................................................................................... 18 3.1 SAN AND NAS STORAGE NETWORKING BASICS ............................................................................................. 18 3.2 FIBRE CHANNEL STORAGE NETWORKING BASICS .........................................................................................18 3.3 IP STORAGE NETWORKING........................... .....................................................................................................19 3.4 HYPER-V SERVER NETWORKING CONSIDERATIONS....................................................................................... 22 4 MICROSOFT VIRTUALIZATION BEST PRACTICES…………………………................................................. 28 4.1 HYPER-V................................................................................................................................................................28 4.2 SYSTEM CENTER VIRTUAL MACHINE MANAGER...........................................................................................37 4.3 FAILOVER CLUSTERING.....................................................................................................................................40 5 BEST PRACTICES FOR CITRIX XENDESKTOP WITH PROVISIONING SERVER........................ 45 5.1 CITRIX XENDESKTOP AND PROVISIONING SERVER OVERVIEW....................................................................45 5.2 CITRIX XENDESKTOP AND PROVISIONING SERVER DEPLOYMENT..............................................................46 5.3 SCALABILITY.........................................................................................................................................................56 6 PROVISIONING…………………........................………………………........................…………………….......58 6.1 VIRTUAL MACHINE PROVISIONING....................................................................................................................58 2 Best Practice for Microsoft Hyper-V with Citrix XenDesktop VDI With NetApp Storage Confidential-Internal Use Only 7 SUMMARY .......................................................................................................................................... 59 8 DOCUMENT REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 59 9 VERSION HISTORY............................................................................................................................. 62 10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................................................................. 62 10.1 ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS ...................................................................................................62 1 INTRODUCTION Storage administrators VDI administrators Network administrators Virtual machine configuration administrators 1.1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY NetApp® technology enables companies to extend their virtual infrastructures to include the benefits of advanced storage virtualization. Our unified storage platforms offer industry-leading technologies in the areas of storage efficiencies, instantaneous virtual machine (VM) and data store cloning for virtual servers and virtual desktops, and virtual data center backup and business continuance solutions. This technical report reviews the best practices for implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with Microsoft® Hyper-V™ and Citrix XenDesktop with NetApp unified storage arrays. NetApp has been providing advanced storage features to Microsoft virtualization solutions since 2004. During this time, NetApp has developed operational guidelines for storage arrays running Data ONTAP® and Hyper-V servers. These techniques, which are described in this report, have been documented and are referred to as “best practices.” 1.2 IMPLEMENTING BEST PRACTICES Unless stated otherwise, the recommendations and best practices presented in this document should be considered as deployment requirements. NetApp, Microsoft, and Citrix will still provide support even if you do not implement all of these best practices. However, disregarding any of these practices commonly results in the need to implement them at a later date, in a much larger environment, and often with application downtime. For these reasons, NetApp recommends implementing all of the best practices defined in this document as a part of your initial deployment or migration. All recommendations in this document apply specifically to deploying Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenDesktop on NetApp. Therefore this document supersedes all recommendations and best practices described in other NetApp documents. NetApp and our partners offer professional services to architect and deploy the designs described in this document. These services can provide optimal virtual storage architecture for your virtual data center. 1.3 AUDIENCE This best practice document is part of the NetApp Technical Library and is intended for use by individuals who are responsible for architecting, designing, managing, and supporting Microsoft virtual infrastructures. Readers should, at a minimum, be familiar with concepts pertaining to Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenDesktop, and NetApp Data ONTAP 8. The administrative roles required to implement the technology and/or configurations are presented at the beginning of each section. 1.4 DOCUMENT ROADMAP This technical report is the main document in a set of NetApp documents covering virtualization on NetApp with Microsoft and Citrix products. This document specifically discusses Hyper-V and XenDesktop. 2 NETAPP STORAGE BEST PRACTICES This section applies to: Storage administrators VDI administrators 2.1 AN INTRODUCTION TO STORAGE IN A VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE In a Hyper-V environment, the availability and performance of the shared storage infrastructure are more critical than those of the individual servers running the virtualized server environment. It is therefore vital to factor in the required level of availability and performance when selecting and designing the storage solution for the virtualized server environment. NetApp offers a comprehensive set of software and hardware solutions to address the most stringent requirements for availability and performance of large, scalable Hyper-V environments. 2.2 THE VALUE OF MULTIPROTOCOL STORAGE ARRAYS The virtualization of a data center results in physical systems being virtualized as part of a cost-saving effort to reduce both capital expenditures and operational expenditures through infrastructure consolidation and increased operational efficiencies. These efforts result in multiple VMs sharing physical resources, including shared storage pools known as datastores. Virtualizing demanding, business-critical applications such as e-mail or database servers results in gains in operational efficiencies. Database Servers might share server resources but are typically configured with exclusive access to the storage it requires. Both Microsoft and NetApp offer technologies that natively support multiple storage protocols. These technologies allow customers to deploy best-in-class virtual data centers that leverage the strengths inherent in using these technologies together. This report goes beyond comparing storage area network (SAN) with network-attached storage (NAS) to consider the operational value based on the