Cisco recently released an updated Cisco Validated Design guide (CVD) for its Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) with Citrix XenDesktop. It is available here and provides a comprehensive coverage of the entire Cisco VXI solution for delivering virtual desktops with XenDesktop – so I highly recommend anyone interested to give it a read.
In this blog, I would like to provide key summarization of the VXI solution as mentioned in the CVD and as it relates to a XenDesktop implementation. On a high level, Cisco VXI is an end-to-end architectural initiative involving Cisco’s Data Center, Collaboration and Networking components enabling the delivery of XenDesktop based virtual desktops – with a focus on achieving better scalability utilizing Cisco data center components, achieving better voice and video collaboration by integrating Cisco communication applications and endpoints for virtual desktops and finally to utilize Cisco networks for delivering optimized desktops. By leveraging the VXI solution, a XenDesktop implementation is further empowered in delivering multimedia rich virtual desktops with exceptional end user performance. Let’s see how this is achieved by breaking down the VXI components and the benefits it provides to XenDesktop: