Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops enables organizations to deliver on-demand Windows applications and desktops to any device, over any network. It provides secure remote access to applications and data residing in the data center. Citrix HDX technology delivers an excellent user experience by addressing the application performance and network challenges presented by virtualization.

We tested with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 7, 1912 Long Term Service Release (LTSR) version. We used the Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS), linked-clone provisioning method to create Pooled-random desktops. MCS is a collection of services that work together to create virtual desktops from a gold image on demand, optimizing storage utilization, and providing a pristine virtual machine to users each time they log in. Citrix Thinwire Plus was used as the remote display protocol in this validation effort.

The following figure shows the architecture of the validated Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop solution stack, including the network, compute, management, and storage layers. The solution runs on the VxRail HCI platform based on VMware vSAN software-defined storage.

We validated this solution with the Login VSI and NVIDIA nVector performance tools. We used a 4-node VxRail cluster. One of the hosts was used to host both management and compute VMs, and the other three hosts were used only for hosting compute VMs.

For the nVector test involving graphics workloads, only one compute node was used for the desktops VMs with six NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs configured on that host. See the Design Guide for this solution for more information about the solution design and best practices.