Now, what about throughput? The host’s networking resources are shared amongst the virtual desktops it supports and users will suffer from poor performance if there’s insufficient bandwidth available. As such, consider routing virtual machine traffic over an SLB bond so that it’s automatically load balanced across two NICs. Virtual machine traffic is load balanced by MAC address and rebalanced every ten seconds. Failover support is provided for all other traffic types, including management and IP-based storage traffic. The load balancing algorithm associates traffic from each virtual interface to one of two NICs in the bond. It’s important to understand that it doesn’t allow a single virtual interface to utilize both NICs in the bond simultaneously.

via Open Source Rack » XenServer for XenDesktop – How many network cards do I need?.

I can see this getting complicated fast.  XenDesktop seems to use a lot of network bandwidth.  Someone must have done a study on this.  Thin clients have been a marque product for the last couple of decades.  Wouldn’t it be nice if our clients didn’t have a hard drive — as if merely eliminating a hard drive would eliminate all IT support for that device.

Todo: Get XenDesktop running and do some tests and estimations.