We're doing a virtual desktop pilot and I was wondering what kind of SAN storage is commonly used. I've heard conflicting reports of SAS/SATA disks or even SSD or large read/write cache settings.
Requirements:
- 50 Seats
- Non persistent
- Windows XP 20 GB storage per seat
- IBM nSeries 6070 (NetApp Rebranded)
- Streaming video and streaming audio is a must (Wyse C50LE is a model we're looking at)
- Medium sized workload (similar to what VMware's doc describes as a knowledge worker)
I've reviewed VMware's Server and Storage Sizing For VMware VDI: A Prescriptive Approach and they are using 7200 RPM SATA drives for a similar workload while colleagues in similar situations were seeing poor performance:
We are using 60 SATA spindles for 20 concurrent connections. We had it running on 20 spindles but it was too slow.
I don't know who/what to believe. Are there any other good resources out there? What are other's experience?