Arguably, the biggest bottleneck in XenDesktop is storage, specifically IOPS. You can buy fast storage, but will still need to battle the IOPS problem. There are some interesting solutions to the IOPS problem being provided by other companies and startups and we will discuss these later in the chapter. Until these are baked into hypervisors and drivers as a standard feature, you will likely need to look at some of the specialized vendors offering a solution to this problem.
Historically, to get good storage performance, you would install the hypervisor onto the local drive and put all of your virtualized resources, such as XenDesktop and its army of virtual machines, onto network shared storage such as iSCSI SAN or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). However, recent Tribal Knowledge says that you get better performance by using fast locally attached storage with solutions such as Fusion IO or HP Accelerator cards that provide SSD class performance.
While PvDisk saves on...