PVS - To Virtualize Or Not To Virtualize, That Is The Question

Hi All,

In the past we always recommended putting PVS on a physical machine due to the demands put on the box.  Lately we've really been changing our tune and I believe storage has really enabled a change for the better.  I'm sure you've noticed that not only servers have been getting faster, but protocols attaching storage to those servers is just awesome.  I still can't get over 10 gigabit, I remember when 100 megabit was fast! 

The number of users per PVS server is really going to vary, but let's say 500 users.  Rachel and I recently did some testing where we virtualized our PVS servers and were able to boot 500 Windows 7 32 bit machines over a 10 gigabit pipe, using PVS 6.1 on vSphere 5.1 on a PVS server with 4 virtual CPUs and 8 gigs of RAM.  The machines booted quite well and we didn't see any problems.  FYI, we've got a paper that will discuss this in a lot of detail coming soon!

A friend of mine once told me when he's doing an assessment he looks for the bottleneck and he NEVER wants the bottleneck to be his technology.  The great thing about virtualizing your PVS server is you can use storage to make PVS faster and easier to administer!  NFS with screaming fast 10 gig networking speed that you can't do with a physical machine and now with oplocks and SMB 2.1 you use your PVS server to cache your vDisk AND store it on a CIFS share for super easy administration!  As always just my thoughts. :-)  If you have PVS or are thinking of implementing, give virtualization a try, you might be pleasantly surprised!