I believe that Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft Hyper-V offer the best VDI experience and System Center the best management solution for this configuration (as well as many others). I work with NetApp and have becoming increasingly impressed by the NetApp / Cisco offerings – FlexPod and then when combined with Citrix / XenDesktop, a killer proposition for easy, reliable VDI. I’ve also included AppSense in the mix as I’ve also been working with them around their User State Virtualisation technology and where it fits both VDI and physical desktops. These whitepapers overlap various aspects of the above, so here they are: Reference Architecture-Based Design Citrix XenDesktop Built on FlexPod Using Cisco Unified Computing System, Microsoft Hyper-V, and NetApp Storage Some of the key points are: The hosting of Citrix XenDesktop Hosted Virtual Desktops (VDI) and Hosted Shared Virtual Desktops models and FlexCast with Microsoft Hyper-V on Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers and NetApp storage were successfully validated. The validated environment consisted of a completely virtualized infrastructure with virtual machines hosted by Microsoft Hyper-V. All the virtual desktop and supporting infrastructure components including Active Directory, Citrix Provisioning Server, and the Citrix XenDesktop Desktop Delivery Controllers were hosted in a virtual machine environment on Microsoft Hyper-V. The tested design showed linear scalability when expanding from 1 server to 16 servers. The performance testing showed that the same user desktop experience and response times were achieved with 110 desktops running on 1 server as with 1760 desktops running on 16 servers. The integrated management model and rapid provisioning capabilities of Cisco UCS Manager makes it easy for scaling the number of desktops from small pilots on a single UCS chassis to very large organization-wide deployments running on tens of chassis. The testing validates that the tested reference architecture can scale linearly from 1 chassis to 4 chassis and beyond...