CS 029: Slow Disk In WVD VS Fast Citrix Storage

What is the difference between storage we currently use within Citrix and the storage that is being used within WVD? Because it seems to be a lot slower and after a theme song, I'm going to show you exactly what the difference is or how we do it versus WVD. So this is one of the episodes you want to watch. Go to cloud-secrets.com and look for episode 29. And there you'll find a link to the video because I'm doing a whiteboard session or behind scenes, if you want to call it and show you the difference between storage in WVD and the current Citrix environment.

So the big question is this, how do you become the cloud expert in your area without having to make any investments in hard and software who provides customers with a secure cloud foundation? How do you start in a way that let you offer your products and services and start making money straight from the beginning? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Marcel Martens and welcome to Cloud Secrets.

So the question is, if the storage that we currently use within Citrix, of that is directly attached to the Hyper-V environment or that it's connected in another way. So that's the question and that's what I'm going to explain here because we want to know the difference between Citrix and the way storage works comparing to WVD.

So now we've got our storage, on top of that storage we've got our servers and on top of that servers we've got our VMs. Storage, server, server, server, and one of those VMs is our PVS, provisioning services system for Citrix. When you got a Citrix VM here, what it basically does is it starts using the network connection and the C-drive is actually located on the PVS drive. So this is like VHD, which will be transported over the network and Citrix will start and it will only use files at that time. So this one is probably 80 gigabytes or so, but for starting Windows, in this case, 2008 R2, it probably only needs 1.6 gigabytes or whatever. So that's what's going to be transferred over the network to be able to start that VM.

Afterwards when this VM is going to start an application, it also goes to this VHD and put those files back. Since this is a file server which uses caching, the hot blocks within this VHD will be in the cache in the memory of the file server. So while this is being 10 gigabytes or more, it's always going to be a lot faster than when it needs to get the data here, get it to the PVS virtual machine towards the Citrix server.

Within WVD, we have no knowledge. Let me get a different color. Within WVD, we don't have any knowledge of the hardware that's below. We see very small read latency, right? Okay, so 0.1 read latency, but the average write latency is over 50, which is pretty high. Here it's the other way around. In our current Citrix environment, we've got like the average write delay is around, I don't know, 0.8 or one and the average read delay is around, do you know the number? No? I believe we'll say 0.30 or so.

We've got some problems here with some applications that are starting a lot slower, within WVD they are starting a lot slower than on the current Citrix environment, so that's what we're trying to figure out and see where the problem is existing so we can fix it. So that's it for today. Hope you join me next time. Bye bye. Marcel Martens.

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