Hello XenServer my old friend
It has been some time since I've done a project where I've been deploying a new XenServer environment. I got the opportunity this week to do a brand new XenApp & XenDesktop deployment with XenServer. The simplicity of XenServer just cannot be overstated. Connected storage, trunked a VLAN and we were off to the races.
The one thing I will say is that the networking needs work. The network bonding could certainly use some work. The Active-Active bonding did not work on failover despite being on the same switch, though once configured for LACP things worked.
Other than that though the performance has been great. With straightforward optimizations and minimal Group Policy, we had 20 second average logons to start. I should also mention that was with the images being on spinning disk. Thanks to MCSIO, performance is really impressive.
XenServer really should get more love for end user computing deployments. It may lack some of the advanced features like VMware, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you are doing non-persistent images, and you SHOULD be doing non-persistent images, most of the advanced features really aren't that necessary.
If you haven't given XenServer some serious consideration, do so. If you have XenDesktop you are already entitled to it so you aren't out anything. Plus Citrix is really developing advanced graphics around XenServer and advanced graphics is pretty much a must anymore. Get looking at it.......10 to Xen!!!
