VDI: Cheap and cheerful

Good afternoon, dear Khabrovites, friends and acquaintances. As a preface, I want to talk about the implementation of one interesting project or, as it is now fashionable to put it, one interesting case regarding the deployment of VDI infrastructure. It seemed that there were a lot of articles on VDI, there is a step-by-step, and a comparison of direct competitors and again a step-by-step and again a comparison of competitive solutions. It seemed that something new could be offered?

And new, which many articles do not have, is a description of the economic effect of implementation, calculation of the cost of ownership of the selected solution, and even more interesting is the comparison of the cost of ownership with similar solutions. In this case, based on the title of the article, the keyword is cheap: what does it mean? At the beginning of the year, one of my colleagues, a friend and friend, had the task of implementing VDI with a minimum number of “windows”, namely a free hypervisor, Linux desktop, a free database, and other ways to minimize costs with our “beloved” Microsoft.

And why with “minimal windows”? Here I digress from the further narration and describe the disposition of why I was interested in the disclosure of this particular topic. A friend of mine, whom I helped to deploy the project, works in an average company with a staff of more than about 500 people, not all software is legal, but work was underway to optimize it, most Front-end information systems are adapted for WEB, I was in a good mood until one fine day collector did not comeMicrosoft’s “personal manager” assigned to the company and began to not, not to offer, not to ask, but to urgently urgently forcibly legalize everything, making many conclusions about the solutions used based on open sources and press releases. It seemed that the company did not mind, but this importunity and obsession, bordering on threats, spurred the long-standing plans of import substitution to minimize the use of MS products and the maximum care in OpenSource. A person from the outside may not particularly believe in the described situation with a representative of the software giant, but at one time a similar situation repeated 1 in 1 with the specified pressure from a Microsoft employee personally with me.

On the other hand, this is an additional trigger for reviewing the development strategy of the IT department in order to diversify the use of paid software products. Again, the trend of penetration of OpenSource solutions for business is gaining momentum, there was a discussion on this topic at the IT-OS 0219 conference and the slide below is a complete confirmation of this.


So, in the organization mentioned above, the goal was set: to force the completion of licensing of MS products, while maximally introducing and using OpenSource solutions. For user access, it was decided to switch from “terminalok” and Windows VDI completely to Linux VDI. The choice of Citrix VDI was determined due to the small administration staff, the large number of branches and the simplicity of the deployment of scaling and the product already purchased.

And in the first part of the article I want to focus on calculating TCO ownership of the Linux VDI infrastructure and choosing a solution based on the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops solution in the common people of XenDesktop and the good old XenServer, although now it is called Citrix Hypervisor (oh, this rebranding, change the name almost all at once product line) and, accordingly, Linux desktops. Everyone seemed to be well aware that the synergy of VDI / APP is the combination of using Vmware as a hypervisor, Citrix as an application delivery controller, and Microsoft as a guest OS. But what if the same technology is needed, but at the lowest cost? Well, let's count:

In the beginning I will talk about the disposition of DO, and after that it was “worth” to switch to a new platform.
For simplicity and integrity of the picture, let us consider only the software part, since the equipment was already available and performed its task.

So, in the beginning it was ... there was a wonderful EMC storage, Blade basket of HP c7000 and 7 G8 servers in the role of virtualization VDI. Windows Server 2012R2 with the Hyper-V role was installed on the servers and SCVMM was used. The acquired VDI platform based on XenDesktop 7.18 was deployed, several terminal farms were deployed. Knowing the disposition and the need to license a large number of software, let's compare the cost of deploying Linux VDI and a complete Microsoft turnkey solution. It was decided to implement the translation progressively, at the initial stage the branches of the company were affected, the second stage was the transfer of the remaining jobs in GO.



At the terminal farm, 1C mainly worked, on VDI desktops the standard office suite, mail, files, the Internet worked (their main function was exclusively reading and printing).

Knowing the list of required software, let's calculate the total cost of ownership of a solution from Microsoft.

Windows Server:

According to Microsoft licensing requirements, the following conditions must be met:

1. You need to license all physical cores in the server.
2. The minimum package of 2-core server licenses is 8 pcs. (or one 16-core license).
3. The minimum package of 2-core processor licenses is 4 pcs. (this rule is enabled if the number of processors is more than two).
4. The Standard License Pack grants the right to use one physical and two virtual instances of Windows Server on one server.
5. The Datacenter license package provides the right to use one physical and any number of virtual instances of Windows Server on a single server.

It turns out that if you need to install more than 13 virtual copies of Windows Server and Windows workstations on the server, it is economically feasible to purchase the Datacenter edition, which we will consider.

Windows 10 VDI:

According to Microsoft's licensing policy, access to virtual desktops from the client OS must be from a device that has a valid Microsoft VDA (Virtual Desktop Access) subscription, except for PCs covered by Software Assurance. In our case, we actually need to acquire and renew annually a subscription to 300 DVA licenses.

“I'm buying VDI software from VMware / Citrix / another vendor.

Do I still need Windows VDA? Yes If you are accessing a Windows client OS as your guest operating system in the datacenter from any non-SA device (including thin clients, iPads, etc), Windows VDA is the appropriate licensing vehicle regardless of the VDI software vendor you choose. The only scenario where you would not need Windows VDA is if you were using PCs covered under Software Assurance as the access devices, since virtual desktop access rights are included as a benefit of SA. ”

SCVMM:

virtual infrastructure management system system center virtual machine manager is included with Microsoft System Center and is not supplied as a separate product. Regarding this approach, it is not necessary to discuss what we have, then we have.

Considering licensing requirements:

1. “You need to license all the physical cores in the server.
2. The minimum package of 2-core server licenses is 8 pcs. (or one 16-core license).
3. The minimum package of 2-core processor licenses is 4 pcs. (this rule is enabled if the number of processors is more than two).
4. The Standard license package provides the right to manage one physical and two virtual OSs on one server.
5. The Datacenter license package provides the right to manage one physical and any number of virtual OSs on one server. ”

The indicated prices are price, of course, with such a volume, a discount is possible, but unlike the GLP prices of Cisco or Lenovo, forget about a discount of 50 or 70%. From experience with MS, over 5% is difficult to see. It turns out only for the first year, the cost of ownership will be more than 5 million rubles, within 3 years the cost of ownership will be ~ 9 million rubles. The number is not small, but for a medium-sized company I’ll say that it’s huge. It turns out that from an economic point of view, the decision already doesn’t seem so simple.

Looking ahead, I’ll say that after calculating the decision of the said project, the management made a positive decision when it was approved.

Total:

As a result, the software bundle turned out to be the following: Citrix Hypervisor Gireprivizor, Linux guest OS, is controlled by Citrix Virtual Desktops. Saving 3 million rubles. per year is significant. Was this project easy to implement? Not! Is this a panacea for such a decision? Not! But clearly there is a place to be for a detailed consideration of the possibility of implementing Citrix VDI-based Linux guest systems. Of course, there are also some small disadvantages, I will tell you more about them in the second part, which will be a complete step-by-step of the solution described.

In conclusion, I want to say, I do not pretend to be a final instance, but the case itself, the task was very interesting.

Thank you for your attention, see you soon)