The answer to this is already in the title, so I am going to keep this section short. Pool Reflection by Rupert Ganzer under CC Pooled or Persistent? Tomorrow’s installations will come even closer together due to the face that XenApp’s IMA architecture has been swapped out for XenDesktop’s FMA in XenDesktop 7.x and XenApp becoming a part of XenDesktop (called “App Edition”). Today’s deployments benefit from combined licensing infrastructure and user-facing components (client, web portal, remote access). With Citrix XenApp already in use today and even more so in the future, it makes a lot of sense to choose XenDesktop as the broker for VDI. Performance should not be worse than with the current three year old desktop PCs.Availability should be similar to traditional desktop PCs.Hardware costs should be kept low, but servers need to be bought from the preferred supplier, which is HP.Operations/management costs should be kept at a reasonable level.Additionally there will be laptops and potentially desktop PCs. Citrix XenApp is and will be the most important platform. VDI is not going to be the only platform.The customer wants to virtualize desktop PC workloads typically found in larger enterprises.These are the requirements we need to work with: Please keep in mind when reading this article that the solution presented here only makes sense for you if your requirements are similar. Without proper requirements we are not building for the real world but for some alternate reality. Only requirements enable us to make choices that benefit the customer. Requirementsīefore we can even start to think about a possible architecture, we need requirements. This is the first article in a multi-part series about building and maintaining an inexpensive scalable platform for VDI in enterprise environments.

Xendesktop server vdi