Citrix XenDesktop implementation with Adobe inDesign CS5.5 (Part II)
It’s been a while, but I’ve finally found the time to update PART II of Adobe CS 5.5 on XenDesktop. The project has already been implemented to production environment for weeks, so far I haven’t heard any complaints from the users. The fundamental design of this project was all based on MCS. We were thinking to leverage Provisioning Server’s streaming technology but it turns out MCS is doing fine on a 25 users site. Since it is a very small user base with a very tight budget we tried to reduce the number of servers as much as we can. It ends up that just one server can actually do a decent job.
Architecture and Role Design
When we were designing the XenDesktop site, we tried to follow the Citrix’s official architecture guideline as much as possible. Due to the budget constraint and the limited user base, we did not put High Availability into consideration. Plus, this is a small pilot project, if the idea of virtual desktop really does take off on the customer’s site, we can always add another module to scale up the infrastructure.
Desktop Design
Before we decide how many vCPU and RAM we should specify on the guest OS, we did a very close analysis on Windows’ behavior while users were running their daily Adobe related tasks. It turned out that the size of memory is far more important than the number of vCPU. We seldom see the CPU usage spike but the memory usage was pretty high.
Hardware Design
Problems
Since MCS doesn’t not support Microsoft’s KMS Windows 7 activation, there was a little bit of hassle for administrators to update their machine catalog, here (CTX128580) is the workaround provided by Citrix. Also, you have to be aware of the activation issue if you have deployed Office 2010 in XenDesktop environment, this problem can be solved by using Microsoft KMS server.
Please feel free to leave any comments if you have any thoughts on this project.
