likely dumb question but do the majority of you guys use MCSIO in MCS setups or no?

It's not a dumb question, it depends on the platform and use case - majority of use cases I would say yes to these days as it's rock solid, but some platforms (such as Nutanix) don't need it given the storage solution under the hood gives similar benefits natively

Not using anymore due to nvme storage availability (in most scenarios) but really reconsidering it. AFAIK it's a prereq for the new images feature which I haven't tried yet but sound really cool.

I use PVS for my non-persistent desktop but the tech "RAM cache with overflow to disk" is the same concept than MCS/IO and even if we use local SSD, when we enabled it, it drastically improved the perf! I would use it, it's been around for a while but size it right.

@Balint Oberrauch funny, this is the exact reason im asking. I figured maybe if it was a requirement then most people have the option set and since i dont then I'm missing some major performance.

If you use the MCSIO driver, you probably need also to enable the wc disk. If you don't enable the wc disk (= setting the size to 0mb), then mcsio ram cache has to be really high. Wouldn't use 256 mb cache as stated in the citrix docs. I think there was a thread 1-2years ago for the exact same topic. Maybe there are some test results by Loginvsi or go-euc

I do to get the same performance as PVS. Also I use a much larger ram cache than many other environments to cache as much as possible in faster ram. So large multi-user machines may have up to 10GB of ram cache.

@Jeff Riechers wc disk is enabled in your setup?

@richminichiello and @Ray Davis fyi - discussion we had yesterday.

Yup. MCSIO cache to ram, fallback to disk. Also I make the disk to be the same size of the c:\ because microsoft likes to go crazy with writing

In general, for us, for traditional 3-tier and knowing it works the same as PVS these days with the WC, it's a good feature for 3-tier architecture implementations/non-Nutanix (which already has these capabilities built-in and doesn't need it) Had some challenges early on with MCSIO and backed off of using it but that was before this V2 or whatever you want to call it where now its the same as PVS.

If dedup on the storage side is working well I don't see a major impact sizing the clones with a big wc disk... nice!

I like adding it in the gold image just in case you need it down the road for MCS.