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 say, one interesting case regarding the deployment of a VDI infrastructure. It seemed that there were a lot of articles on VDI, there was 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 you can offer something new?
And what is new, which many articles do not have, is a description of the economic effect of implementation, calculation of the cost of ownership of the chosen solution, and, what is even more interesting, a comparison of the cost of ownership with similar solutions. In this case, based on the title of the article, the keyword cheap: what does it mean? At the beginning of the year, one of my colleagues, acquaintances and friends had the task of implementing VDI with a minimum number of “windows”, namely a free hypervisor, a Linux desktop, a free database and other ways to minimize costs with our “beloved” Microsoft.
And why with “minimal windows”? Here I will digress from further narration and describe the disposition why I was interested in the disclosure of this particular topic. My friend, whom I helped in the deployment of the project, works in a medium-sized company with a staff of more than about 500 people, not all software is legal, but work on its optimization was underway, most of the Front-end information systems were adapted to the WEB, there was a good mood until one fine day the collector “personal manager” Microsoft assigned to the company did not come and began to no, not offer, not ask, but demand to urgently legalize everything forcibly, 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 on the long-standing plans of import substitution to minimize the use of MS products and maximize the care in OpenSource. A person from the outside may not really believe in the described situation with a representative of the software giant, but at one time a similar situation was repeated 1 in 1 with the indicated pressure from a Microsoft employee personally with me.
On the other hand, this is an additional trigger for revising 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-AXIS 0219 conference and the slide below is a complete confirmation of this.
So, in the organization mentioned above, the goal was set: to speed up the completion of licensing of MS products, while implementing and using OpenSource solutions as much as possible. For user access, it was decided to switch from terminals and Windows VDI completely to Linux VDI. The choice of Citrix VDI was due to the small administration staff, large number of branches and ease of deployment of scaling and already purchased product.
And in the first part of the article, I want to focus on calculating the TCO of owning a Linux VDI infrastructure and choosing a solution based on the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops solution in the common people XenDesktop and the good old XenServer, although now it is called Citrix Hypervisor (oh, this rebranding, change the name of almost the entire product line) and, accordingly, Linux desktops. Everyone seemed to know very well that VDI/APP synergy is a combination of using Vmware as a hypervisor, Citrix as an application delivery controller, and Microsoft as a guest OS. But what if you need the same technology, but at minimal cost? Well, let's count:
In the beginning, I will talk about the disposition of BEFORE, and after that it was “worth” to switch to a new platform.
For simplicity and integrity of the picture, let's consider only the software part, as the equipment already existed and performed its task.
So in the beginning it was... there was a great EMC storage system, an HP c7000 Blade basket and 7 G8 servers in the VDI virtualization role. The servers had Windows Server 2012R2 installed with the Hyper-V role and used SCVMM. The purchased VDI platform based on XenDesktop 7.18 was deployed and several terminal farms were deployed. Knowing the disposition and the need to license a large amount of software, let's compare the cost of deploying Linux VDI and a complete turnkey solution based on Microsoft. It was decided to implement the transfer progressively, at the initial stage, the company's branches were affected, the second stage was supposed to transfer the remaining jobs to civil defense.
On the terminal farm, 1C was mainly working, the standard office suite, mail, files, Internet worked on VDI desktops (their main function was exclusively reading and printing).
Knowing the list of required software, let's calculate the total cost of owning a solution from Microsoft.
Windows Server:
According to Microsoft's licensing requirements, the following conditions must be met:
- You need to license all physical cores in the server.
- The minimum package of 2-core licenses per server is 8 pcs. (or one 16-core license).
- The minimum package of 2-core licenses for the processor is 4 pcs. (this rule is enabled if the number of processors is more than two).
- The Standard License Pack provides the right to use one physical and two virtual instances of Windows Server on one server.
- The Datacenter License Pack 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 instances of Windows Server and Windows workstations on a server, then it makes economic sense to purchase the Datacenter edition, which we will consider.
Windows 10 VDI:
According to Microsoft's licensing policy, client OS virtual desktops must be accessed from a device that has a valid Microsoft VDA (Virtual Desktop Access) subscription, except for PCs covered by Software Assurance. In our case, in fact, you need to purchase and annually renew a subscription for 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:
The virtual infrastructure management system system center virtual machine manager is included in the Microsoft System Center package and is not available as a separate product. With regards to this approach, there is no need to discuss what we have, we have.
Considering licensing requirements:
- “You need to license all the physical cores in the server.
- The minimum package of 2-core licenses per server is 8 pcs. (or one 16-core license).
- The minimum package of 2-core licenses for the processor is 4 pcs. (this rule is enabled if the number of processors is more than two).
- The Standard license package grants the right to manage one physical and two virtual operating systems on one server.
- The Datacenter license package grants the right to manage one physical and any number of virtual operating systems on one server.”
The indicated prices are price lists, of course, with such a volume, a discount is possible, but unlike the GLP price lists of Cisco or Lenovo, forget about a 50 or 70% discount. According to the experience of interaction with MS, it is difficult to see more than 5%. It turns out that 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 figure is not small, but for a medium-sized company I would say that it is huge. It turns out that from an economic point of view, the solution does not seem so simple.
Looking ahead, I will say that after calculating the decision of the specified project, the management made a positive decision when it was approved.
The bottom line:
As a result, the bundle of software turned out to be the following: Citrix Hypervisor, Linux guest OS, everything is controlled by Citrix Virtual Desktops. Save 3 min. rub. per year is significant. Was this project easy to implement? No! Is it a panacea for such a solution? No! But it definitely has a place to be for a detailed consideration of the possibility of implementing based on Citrix VDI with Linux guests. Of course, there are also not small cons, I will talk about them in more detail in the second part, which will be a complete step-by-step of the described solution.
In conclusion, I want to say that I do not pretend to be a conclusion in the final instance, but the case itself, the task was very interesting.
Thank you for your attention, see you soon)
Source: habr.com