I recently posted on how Provisioning Server helps to offload and reduce the amount of IOPS your underlying storage needs to support to maintain sufficient performance of your XenDesktop VDI deployments (see link here). One of our Citrix Engineers asked me to also cover MCS and to explain how Citrix is actively working to achieve the same kind of results even when using MCS and a "master image".

So here it goes!

It's important to understand the goal here-- to minimize the amount of horsepower and cost needed for the underlying storage in a XenDesktop VDI deployment. As described in the PVS post linked above, the "issue" with things like Citrix's MCS or VMware's Linked Clone technology is that it relies on a "master image", and that image gets pounded with IO. To work around this, lots of environments invest heavily in their underlying storage. And this is absolutely acceptable, and a STRONG/SOLID storage environment is STILL critically important here and in all other virtualized environments. But again, the goal is to minimize the amount of horsepower and cost to support this particular deployment.

This is where Citrix's XenServer Intellicache comes into play (not to be confused with HDX Intellicache, which does operate similarly but specifically for bandwidth and end user experience optimization). This technology leverages the LOCAL drives in the XenServer host itself to help "offload" disk operations.

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