Accelerate and simplify Citrix XenDesktop deployments

Citrix XenDesktop provides IT organizations with the means to deliver rich, personalized virtual desktops as a managed service. Atlantis ILIO enables IT organizations to accelerate and simplify environments delivering XenDesktop-based virtual desktops, regardless of the implementation architecture adopted.

Citrix offers significant flexibility in the design of XenDesktop-based desktop environments including support for both persistent and non-persistent hosted virtual desktops, as well as support for centralized or distributed physical desktops. XenDesktop supports application deployment through application hosting and application virtualization streaming using Citrix XenApp, modification of base images using pooled desktops, as well as supporting any existing application provisioning solution that may already be in place.  Regardless of the type of virtual desktop chosen or the application provisioning technique used, all architectures rely heavily on the data center storage fabric to deliver acceptable performance.  Disk performance throughput (measured in IOPS) is critical to delivering a quality desktop experience with performance that is faster than a PC. In a conventional shared storage environment, providing the storage throughput required to support many hundreds or thousands of desktops at a low cost per desktop is a significant challenge.

Simplify Citrix XenDesktop Architecture

The inherent flexibility of Citrix XenDesktop allows system architects to design solutions tailored to meet the needs of multiple distinct user communities.  This flexibility is delivered at a cost of increased complexity, which can create operational challenges and slow deployment.  Atlantis ILIO allows system architects to simplify XenDesktop deployments, without compromising performance and without increasing the cost of storage needed to support the environment. System architects can leverage ILIO’s advanced deduplication capabilities to create persistent desktops for all users with the same, or better, storage characteristics than can be achieved using pooled desktops.

Scaling Citrix XenDesktop Storage

Growing a conventional Citrix XenDesktop environment requires significant additional investment in storage. Citrix XenDesktop supports the use of OS streaming to provide personalized non-persistent virtual desktops based on a single master image, this significantly reduces the storage requirements compared to persistent virtual desktops but still generate a tremendous amount of IO traffic. Conventional SAN/NAS storage arrays can only deliver the data throughput needed to support VDI by increasing storage drives and controllers well beyond that needed to deliver to the required disk space.  More virtual desktops require more storage; it is as simple as that.

With Atlantis ILIO, all duplicate data requests are served from files process by the Atlantis ILIO software virtual appliance and are never seen by the storage infrastructure, eliminating the need to spend more on storage controllers and their associated disks. As more desktops are added to Atlantis ILIO, inline deduplication of data becomes more and more efficient, speeding up virtual desktops and decreasing the amount of storage capacity consumed per virtual desktop.

Increase IOPS per Desktop—Fast Virtual Desktop Hard Drives

Atlantis ILIO processes all common disk read/write activity locally at the Windows NTFS protocol layer on the same rack (Top-Of-Rack deployment) or the same hypervisor (On Each Server deployment), giving each virtual desktop faster hard drive than a physical PC.  The impact of Atlantis ILIO on initial system startup, logon performance and application usage is similar to that of replacing a physical PCs standard hard disk with a Solid State Drive (SSD), making the virtual desktop not only faster than a conventional desktop PC but also significantly cheaper than upgrading every physical desktop  to deliver equivalent performance.