50 Windows 10 VMs for staff

[devzank]

Hi there,

I'm wondering if anyone can help me?

I've been given a budget of around £6000-£8000 to get a system setup for employees.

Essentially we want employees to work off a VM image and to back everything up to our NAS then to our cloud server.

The employees utilise Microsoft packages and web browsers as well as some programs but nothing too intensive.

I've worked with proxmox before but I'm wondering the scalability of this and the specs I'll need to get 50+ employees running comfortable.

I was looking at the 3990x and 256Gb of ram. I'm wondering if I'm better waiting until the 5990x. It's not something immediate but it is approaching very soon.

I'd sincerely appreciate any advice. Thank you.

 

[ness1602]

If i'm not mistaken, you cannot run win 10 machine (legaly) on virtualization.

 

[apoc]

If i'm not mistaken, you cannot run win 10 machine (legaly) on virtualization.

Yes you can - using the correct licenses.
OEM licensing wouldnt works that is true...

But honestly, i think we are all not in the Position to give (binding) legal advice in MS licensing.
So this is something @devzank would need to check anyways.

From a Ressource perspective 50 Win 10 VDI desktops with decent user experience and not too heavy workload will probably be around
- 2 vcpus per desktop
- 8gb memory (win 10 is hungry, office too)
- 60-80gb for the boot drive + data disks

Sum:
100vcpus
400gb memory
4TB disk storage (depending if you use linked clones it could be way less)

I'd use a ratio of 4:1 or 6:1 for the CPU. (Very conservative)
So 14-25Cores (not threads) for the workload.
Use high clock CPU if possible (2.8 GHz onwards)
512 GB memory (more will help)
Don't underestimate the io requirements. 50 desktops will swap, do updates etc so some decent performing storage layer is needed.
I'd try to add flash to the game, but it may be a pricy thing (depending on what you choose)

 

[bobmc]

That's a tight budget for what you are looking to achieve. I assume this is for staff remoting into the VM from home?

If it were me, I'd be looking to setup a 3 or 4 way cluster, as you will need more system resources that you can comfortably fit in one box. As @tburger says, providing enough ram is going to be the challenge, plus you will need decent I/O performance both from storage and networking.

Also a cluster gives you some redundancy and some options for balancing workloads and doing management.

I think your budget should be closer to £15k unless you're willing to look at the used market.

 

[devzank]

That's a tight budget for what you are looking to achieve. I assume this is for staff remoting into the VM from home?

If it were me, I'd be looking to setup a 3 or 4 way cluster, as you will need more system resources that you can comfortably fit in one box. As @tburger says, providing enough ram is going to be the challenge, plus you will need decent I/O performance both from storage and networking.

Also a cluster gives you some redundancy and some options for balancing workloads and doing management.

I think your budget should be closer to £15k unless you're willing to look at the used market.

I really appreciate everyone's responses, yes the budget is tight but if they really want it. They would have to pay for it. Essentially we work with extremely sensitive data and we want to boot users straight into hypervisor from the bios then have them have tb ability to log into a VM with the required software packages. It's nothing too intensive. 8gb ram is definitely the way forward. I'm looking into the 5990x or EPYC.

Storage will all be NVME ssds. Is licensing okay if I purchase everything?

 

[apoc]

Make sure you have required CPU capacity. This is where things go wrong most of the time.
Regarding MS licenses: go reach out to someone who is authorised MS partner. They should be able to help you on the licensing topic. You are not the first person doing a project like this.