OS streaming can deliver considerable manageability benefits to Intel IT training rooms with multi-user PCs. To evaluate performance and utilization in a production environment, we conducted proof of concept (PoC) testing in two rooms located in different buildings on an Intel campus. We found that OS streaming improved manageability and delivered fast client boot times with moderate server and network utilization, even during worst-case boot storms.
Improving Manageability with OS Streaming in Training Rooms
392KB, PDF
My company Questeq has been working with OS streaming for over 5 years. We were instrmental in the product development of Ardence ( BXP) to add disk side caching. We went down the road of no hard drives – we found that using the hard drive as a caching devices for the OS was much more efficent in our labs. – we had over 100 school district using the technology before the Citrix purchase.
In your article you only mention scripting as the tool to create the streams – was there a reason or did I miss something?
(Define, Measure,Analyze,Improve and Control!)
Hi Ron! Thanks for your question. The scripting discussed in the paper was a convenient way for us to kick off a massive reboot of all of our training room PCs. If everybody reboots at the same time, it is a worst case scenario on the end-to-end solution. We wanted to see what effect it would have on network bandwidth and the load on the server. The value of scripting was that it enabled us to capture additional data (like timestamps) and allowed us to reproduce the scenario consistently (check results of multiple runs for data quality.)