Excalibur Technology Preview provides a first glimpse of some upcoming enhancements to XenApp and XenDesktop. While the unification of XenDesktop and XenApp deployment and management of unique architecture and adding support for Windows operating systems next generation are undoubtedly the most obvious changes, we made some number of other improvements in the entire product. Among those are improvements in both service creation machine (MCS) and procurement services (WPV) characteristics.
Provisioning for XenApp servers via PVS or MCS
One advantage of FlexCast Management architecture is updated as XenApp farms can now be deployed and managed from the studio. It also means they can be provisioned using the linked clone delivery model Machine Creation Services that was available in XenDesktop for some versions. One of the main benefits of MCS is the ease with which new catalogs machines (virtual desktops and XenApp virtual servers now) can be created. Updates Catalog Studio wizards guide you in if the initial deployment of a virtual farm XenApp. The model MCS provides many of the same benefits of managing the unique image of Provisioning Services, but works directly on the storage managed by your hypervisor, so there is no need to deal with PXE or build-deploy Provisioning Services. However, this is limited to the new Excalibur version of XenApp.
PVS streaming batteries for XenApp and desktop catalogs is always an option in Excalibur, providing improved image management capabilities and storage IO optimizations beneficial in larger, more complex environments, although infrastructure management Provisioning services remains in a separate management console. Procurement services continue to provide a centralized library of images for mixed environments where multiple "sites" or "farms" of XenDesktop and XenApp are used.
Support for New Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Storage capacities
Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Release 3 add new and improved facilities for access storage for virtual machines, and you can try some of these features in the Tech Preview Excalibur with both PVS and MCS.
Hyper-V Version 3 adds support for a new virtual disk format, VHDX. The new format can solve some performance and alignment issues VHD formats / from AVHD. MCS catalogs created on Windows Server 2012 / Hyper-V 3 hosts will automatically take advantage of this new format. Similarly, the secondary disks attached to virtual machines for write caches PVS or personal vDisk will benefit VHDX. Provisioning Services vDisk of which are accessible and managed directly from PVS servers themselves continue to use the base VHD format because you can still run the PVS servers on Windows Server 08 R2.
Another new feature in Hyper-V Volume 3 is the shared cluster support (CSV) read caching. This capability is integrated in the clustering mechanism failover in Windows Server and allows clusters of Hyper-V 3 hosts to use RAM host as a read cache for disk of the virtual machine (VHDX files) on the block storage. In Excalibur we can take advantage of this ability to reduce the IO storage for MCS catalogs at startup and opening session storms. The effect is similar to caching that occurs on PVS hosts, except that the blocks are delivered once each Hyper-V host and shared between virtual machines on that host. CSV collection makes use of RAM to host this cache so there will be a compromise between the cache size and the amount of RAM available for VM.
Bottom line? There are some major enhancements to the Hyper-V platform in Windows Server 2012 and Excalibur takes good advantage of them to offer a combined solution that is robust, efficient and scalable.
Coming
The Excalibur Technology Preview provides some, but not all, of the provisioning enhancements currently under development. Other improvements that we work include: MCS support for KMS support Windows Server 2012 SMB storage 3, and significant performance and usability enhancements in image capture and creation tools PVS catalog. Stay tuned ...
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