Citrix Introduces Azure Managed Disks (Preview) in XenApp & XenDesktop on Azure

You can now try a preview of Azure Managed Disks in Citrix Cloud’s XenApp & XenDesktop service while we put the finishing touches on the production version. Managed Disks provides scalable and highly available storage without the need to create storage accounts and worry about storage account IOPS constraints.

Overview of Managed Disks

Azure Managed Disks is an elastic disk storage system that is offered as an alternative to the current storage account-based system. Currently, XenDesktop has to create and manage multiple IOPS constrained storage accounts to provide storage for the VHD blobs that holds the operating system and data disks for provisioned virtual machines (VDAs). In addition, copying images between storage accounts is slow so copying each OS disk directly from the master image is not feasible for catalogs that use multiple storage accounts. Instead, the master image is replicated to each storage account when a catalog is created and updated so that each OS disks can be copied from a copy of the master image in the same storage account.

Managed Disks eliminates the complexity of storage accounts and offers a simple scalable and highly available solution for creating and managing disks and does away with the time consuming need to replicate master images to storage accounts. Furthermore, reliability of machines in availability sets is improved as Managed Disks are allocated to storage clusters in a manner that optimizes the distribution across fault domains.

Read the entire article here, Introducing Azure Managed Disks (Preview) in XenApp & XenDesktop on Azure

via the fine folks at Citrix Systems, Inc.