Speed. More speed. And to get more speed with desktop virtualization, we hear more and more about how important IOPS are to being able to support the virtual desktop. Not enough IOPS means slowness. No speed. I've had a few blogs about it and plan to have a few more. What I wanted to talk about was an interesting discussion I recently had with 3 Senior Architects within Citrix Consulting(Doug Demskis, Dan Allen and Nick Rintalan). There are 3 smart guys who I talk to fairly regularly and the discussions get quite interesting.

This particular discussion was no different. We were talking about the importance of IOPS, RAID configs, spindle speeds with regards to an enterprise's SAN infrastructure. (Deciding if you are going to use a SAN for your virtual desktops is a completely different discussion that I've had before and Brian Madden had more recently). But for the sake of this article, let's say you've decided "Yes, I will use my SAN." If your organization already has an enterprise SAN solution, chances are that the solution has controllers with plenty of cache. Does this make the IOPS discussion a moot point? If we simply use an IOPS calculator (at least the ones I've seen) and do not take into account the caching capabilities of the SAN controllers, won't we over-provision our virtual desktop environment and end up wasting more money/resources?

To learn more and to read the entire article at its source, please refer to the following page, Cache is King- The Citrix Blogs