PVS or MCS for a 5000 single site VDI deployment?

[john doe1709163424]

Hello,

We're currently using Citrix MCS for our 500 VDI deployment on Nutanix HCI and it's working well, but we're planning on building a new site with 5000 VDIs. What would be the best approach for a single site 5000 VDI deployment?

Thanks in advance.

[Ken Z]

If you're not updating the gold images frequently (you should be updating them at least once a month with security patches at least) then MCS, but otherwise PvS as updating and deploying changes will be much faster with PvS, even on a Nutanix Cluster. 

 

I've recently deployed a small 150 User Windows 10/Windows 11 mix of VDI desktops on a 3-node all-SSD Nutanix on 2203 LTSR, and even with that small number, deploying an updated image to the cluster is slower than some of the 1000-device PvS deployments I've done in the past. Updating a 5000 VDI farm will take a lot longer with MCS than with PvS, and if you have to quickly roll back to a previous image due to issues, that will take you several hours.

 

As Carl says, as long as you've got a stable network (preferably a resilient 10Gb), and several PvS Servers, properly sized and specced, you should be ok.

 

Regards

 

Ken Z 

[CarlStalhood]

In PVS it's easier to replicate images (vDisk) to multiple clusters/locations, but there's overhead in adding PVS servers, including training, support, maintenance, more points of failure, etc.

 

If you have to maintain images across multiple hypervisor clusters, you should be using scripting anyways.

 

Otherwise, it's just a personal preference one way or the other.

[john doe1709163424]

40 minutes ago, Carl Stalhood1709151912 said:

In PVS it's easier to replicate images (vDisk) to multiple clusters/locations, but there's overhead in adding PVS servers, including training, support, maintenance, more points of failure, etc.

 

If you have to maintain images across multiple hypervisor clusters, you should be using scripting anyways.

 

Otherwise, it's just a personal preference one way or the other.

Image management wouldn't be a problem as there won't be much image updating. I've always read that PVS is better suited for big deployments that's why I considered it. So MCS is capable to scale to 5K VDIs with no problems?

[CarlStalhood]

MCS's purpose is to push images to machines, but the machines run on the native hypervisor with no other MCS dependency other than the identity disk. PVS on the other hand depends on the PVS Servers and the network to be performant and available.

[James Kindon]

Nutanix HCI makes MCS shine - I would lean away from PVS on Nutanix for the most part and let MCS do it's thing

[Ken Z]

One final thing, although it might be late to say this, but if deploying MCS with a Nutanix Cluster, when installing the VDA, make sure to exclude the MCS Storage Optimization component.

 

Regards

 

Ken Z