Tangent Vertex VDI?

[Nate7311]

Has anyone played with any of the Tangent Vertex VDI-in-a-box stuff? Had a rep hit me out of the blue, yesterday. Seems a bit too simplistic to me... Any thoughts?

Link

 

[NetJunkie]

Look at the rest of their products. VDI isn't exactly their thing. It's just VMware View in a box.

 

[RussC]

I'd like to see if anyone else is using, or has demo'd, this hardware as well. I work for a small private college in Ohio.

I have a 60 VM demo unit sitting behind me. I've already setup the VDI portion of it. I have a meeting scheduled with their engineers to setup the PXE server and Citrix Access Gateway for outside access.

The unit itself is a Fujitsu RX200 S6 server which I was told could be warrantied for up to 10 years. 2 x Quad-Core Xeons, 96GB ram, and about 900GB worth of 15k SAS drives. It's running VMWare ESXi 5 as the hypervisor. Once you get into the Management interface, which would be familiar to anyone running VMWare, you'll notice a couple virtual servers. The first one to configure is essentially Kaviza's VDI-in-a-box virtual appliance. Kaviza was recently purchased by Citrix and it has been improved.

I'll give you my pros and cons so far:

Pros:
-Cheaper than other solutions (especially for edu/gov)
-Very easy install, pretty straight-forward
-Internal storage, so no need for expensive backend SAN/NAS appliance
-1U server available in 20/60/125 VM units (**this is only if you assign 1GB ram per VM, which after talking with an engineer he suggested 2GB per Win7 vm, which lowers your total available) irked me (the more VM's required the more cores and ram they include)
-Easy to add servers to Kaviza's Grid for load-balancing
-Management of Kaviza's appliance is simple (adding images, editing images, creating templates, and assigning templates to users or groups)
-Integrates with MSAD, so you can pull existing Security Groups and assign them to templates
-Utilizes their PXE agent for a cost, or you can access VM's via Kaviza's website or Citrix Receiver (works on iPad/iPhones that I have tested)
-Can limit the max # of machines running per template, and choose the amount that you keep running (so if you choose to keep 5 running, and someone logs on, it fires up another VM automatically)
-You can have Persistent and Non-Persistent VM's

Cons:
-I haven't had more than 10 VM's running at once yet, but I'm guessing that if I had 40+ VM's running on this server with 15k drives in it, response times might not be that great. But that is just from what I'm seeing so far. The 125 VM unit includes SSD eMCL drives which is probably what I would choose.
-ESXi has its limitations, but Tangent's trying to keep the cost down.
-Multiple "Golden" images required if you want to limit software access. (so if you have 25 licenses of an application you have to have an image for that app so that you can limit it to 25 machines)
-Kaviza management does not grant you as granular control as some other solutions. You can't say at 1130AM I want 25 of this specific machine started and ready for a class and at 5PM I only want 2 powered on and ready.
-Not really a con, but I've not had a lot of experience with Fujitsu servers, so I'm hoping they make decent servers.


If you're going to implement a VDI solution anywhere, especially replacing existing PCs, it has to be rock solid. This solution is pretty new to the market, as in the last couple of years. Not much out on the net about it. It seems ok so far, but I have a few more weeks of testing to do and can hopefully spin up over 40 VM's to check the hardware out.