storage considerations for vdi - scalar presentation at toronto vmug 2014
DESCRIPTION
A look at some of the storage challenges that come with VDI, and some of the newer storage vendors in the marketplace that help address these challengesTRANSCRIPT
1 © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
2 © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
} Introduction about Scalar Decisions
} VDI Challenges
} Storage for VDI
} Vendor Solutions
} Q & A
3 © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
Introduction
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Background in architecting mission-critical data centre infrastructure
Founded in 2004 $105M in FY13
Revenues Nationwide Presence
120 Employees Nationwide
25% Growth YoY Toronto | Vancouver
Ottawa | Calgary | London Greater than 1:1
technical:sales ratio
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} The country’s most skilled IT infrastructure specialists, focused on security, performance and control tools
} Delivering infrastructure services which support core applications
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7 © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
} Why am I not getting the desired number of virtual desktops on a vSphere host?
} My ThinApp applications run really, really slow…
} Why does it take 90 minutes to provision 5 linked clones?
} I can’t print…
} My physical desktop runs better than my virtual desktop…
} My connections are load balancing right…
} I can’t connect in from my home computer…
} Hey, would you mind validating my design?
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9 © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
} Improperly Configured/Sized Environments – No Physical/Virtual Desktop Assessment – Little Understanding of User Community & Usage Patterns – Vendor based “Guesstimation” of VM to Host Density – Oversubscription – Virtual Machine Configuration (vCPU & vRAM) – Lack of proper Plan & Design
} Dependent Infrastructure Improperly Sized – Linked/Full Clone Storage (IOPS & Disk Speed) – File (CIFS/SMB) Storage Considerations (User Data & Persona) – Networking Bandwidth & Quality of Service
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} Customer Environmental Considerations – Contending with other network services & traffic – Using Shared Infrastructure ﹘ Database Server ﹘ Storage ﹘ Network ﹘ Server Infrastructure
– Application & Peripheral Integration – Special Business & Technical Requirements (i.e. BCDR) – SLAs
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Design Validation Benefits
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} Understand how their solution will perform and/or scale – How many desktops can I get onto a single host? – Will my storage or dependent infrastructure scale? – How do the components of the solution scale? – What will the user experience be when my infrastructure in under duress?
} “Estimation vs Guesstimation” – Provides data to accurately estimate hardware/software needs
} Identify problems BEFORE solutions are placed into pilot or production deployments – Identify and fix your issues before your users experience problems. – Deployment with a minimal amount of issues is considered successful
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} Badly designed storage can cripple a VDI system
} There are literally dozens of different vendors to choose from
} Storage technologies are changing rapidly. Where do you begin?
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} Desktop workloads do not have the same storage requirements as server workloads
} Desktops are extremely read heavy during boot and logon but change to write heavy during steady state
} You need lots of random IOPS for desktops (read AND write)
} VDI desktops display bursty IOPS throughout the day
} Accommodate the burst demands
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} Implications of volatility – Larger swings in workload – Greater need for burst capacity; risk of inadequate
capacity – More risk to user experience – More performance driven user hostility
} Conclusions – You need to lower volatility or provide adequate burst
capacity
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} Flash and SSD is very much the rage with storage vendors today
} Terms like SLC, MLC, EMLC, PCI-based flash, flash acceleration are constantly being tossed around
} The real question is can the storage solution deliver a given amount of storage at a given amount of IOPS, with a given amount of power, in given number of rack units, at a specific price point?
} What a vendor uses to accomplish that really doesn’t matter – as long as it supports your requirements
} Some vendors use pure flash, some a mix between flash/spinning disk
} Some vendors accelerate spinning disk with RAM, others use flash as cache
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} VDI used to be based on a non-persistent desktop model in order to achieve storage optimization
} Users demand a persistent VDI model and storage solutions can now accommodate that model with storage efficiencies
} Although there are some great performance acceleration technologies today – many only focus on non-persistent VDI
} Make sure your storage solution for VDI supports persistent desktop – in an optimized way across capacity & performance
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Vendor solutions
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Hybrid Arrays
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} Combine the best of what both the SSD and HDD worlds have to offer and create an array that leverages the benefits of solid state storage for performance while continuing to be able to rely on the massive capacity benefits inherent in HDD-based solutions
} Balance between the storage metrics of $/GB and $/IOPS
} A hybrid array very nicely balances these two metrics and can satisfy a wide swath of business needs (i.e. VDI)
} Solid state storage is often used as a mega cache which provides significant acceleration of all reads and writes from and to the array
} Newcomers generally have the Greenfield advantage here as they can build systems with flash in mind and can sometimes take more advantage of flash's unique characteristics
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} New hybrid players rely on commodity hardware and differentiate themselves in software and because they don't require as many expensive SSDs
} Hybrid arrays carry a price tag that is a fraction of what one would find with an all-SSD product
} While it won't beat the all-SSD array in a head to head test, when one measures the performance based on true needs, hybrid storage is often the perfect solution.
} VDI - A hybrid array in this scenario is a perfect fit. Because commonly accessed files are cached on super-fast SSDs, boot and login storms are a thing of the past.
} Deduplication/compression savings in VDI is incredibly high, so you may find yourself using much less disk space than you need
} Because there is ample capacity in a hybrid device, an organization can consider allowing users to create persistent, customizable desktops
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} Patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture
} CASL accelerates applications by using flash memory as a read cache in conjunction with a write-optimized data layout
} Accelerated performance for greater throughput and more IOPS, and latencies of less than a millisecond
} Greater storage efficiency (compression), reducing the storage footprint needed by 30 to 75 percent
} It protects data by supporting instant snapshots for easy backup and restoration
} Efficient replication for disaster recovery
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Key Benefits for VDI
} Deliver a consistent high-performance user experience
} Enable business continuity for end users
} Independently scale performance and capacity without downtime
} Reduce costs with efficient capacity utilization
} Leverage SmartStack reference architectures to speed deployment
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} 3U appliance
} Tintri Flash First Design: VMstore is a hybrid storage solution
} VMstore integrates flash as a first-class storage medium rather than as a bolt-on cache or tier
} Tintri’s patented Flash First Design incorporates algorithms for inline deduplication, compression and working set analysis to service more than 99 percent of all IO from flash
} Desktop VM performance and responsiveness that meets or exceeds the performance of fast desktop PCs and laptops
} Desktop VM Pool creation and provisioning operations
} User acceptance is sure to suffer if it takes an excessive amount of time to log in and gain access to their desktops
} Desktop pool refresh or “recompose” operations require at the very least at least one reboot operation for each virtual desktop
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} VM-aware architecture (NFS based)
} Each VMstore deploys quickly as a datastore to vSphere over 10GbE Ethernet.
} Low latency performance, high storage I/O bandwidth
} High VM density (large numbers of VMs) drives down $/VM costs
} Inline deduplication and compression
} Per VM snapshots and rapid cloning
} Unique server, network and per VM statistics and correlations (Tintri Bottleneck visualization)
} A unique, well designed and modern UI
} Tight vSphere and vCenter integration
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Hyperconverged
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} Solutions comprised of hardware and software
} Bundling the software with pre-architected hardware into hyperconverged appliances allows them to provide customers with better support and be sure that the total package can provide a predictable level of performance and capacity
} Support for this predefined hardware set is much easier than simply supporting whatever customers decide to pull off the shelf and use
} Avoids the need to choose, test and optimize the environment, which results in a longer time-to-value
} best of breed” environment can be considered “undifferentiated heavy lifting” due to the amount of work that it takes to make sure everything is operating as expected
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NDFS Cluster Infinite Scalability
• Controller VMs create NDFS cluster • Storage Pool created from all Disks (RF:2) • NFS datastore presented to hypervisor (SMB for Hyper-V) • I/O reads local, I/O writes synchronous
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Built for Speed The great majority of Read/Write I/O is serviced locally
• vMotion or HA event triggers RF review and data locality • Only accessed blocks are brought local (RF maintained) • Background process (no flooding network)
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NDFS Pooled resources
10G
bps
Ethe
rnet
ND
FS
SINGLE NODE Compute:16 Cores Storage: Flash: 800GB SSD HDD: 4TB Controller: Nutanix Storage controller
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} An abstracted pool of storage that looks like a single volume of storage but acts like a virtual hybrid-flash storage array
} Built directly into the hypervisor, so supports features like HA, DRS, vMotion, Storage vMotion
} Pool of storage is based on locally mounted SSDs and HDDs
} ESXi hosts without any local storage can consume VSAN
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} Writes to VSAN are handled by SSD and flushed down to HDD
} Reads from VSAN are pulled from SSD cache
} Does not require a local RAID set, just a bunch of disks
} Virtual machines can be striped for performance (data written to multiple HDDSs) and protected by replicas (data written to multiple ESXi hosts)
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Flash Hypervisor Software
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} Flash Hypervisor software, like PernixData FVP, aggregates server-side Flash (PCIe or SSD) to accelerate reads and writes to primary storage
} Allows IT administrators to scale storage performance independent of capacity, and without modifying existing applications or storage
} 10x faster application performance - accelerating reads and writes in server-side Flash, FVP accelerates storage I/O where it has the most impact, on the host where the application resides
} Substantially more IOPS at a fraction of the cost - When FVP is used in conjunction with a single $600 SSD, you can get approximately 50,000 IOPS. In comparison, a $100,000 SAN delivers the same 50,000 IOPS
} More capacity at a lower price - Since storage performance is coming from the server tier, you can optimize the SAN for capacity and data services - less expensive, higher capacity drives in your SAN, lowering your cost per GB
} Increased VM density and minimized server hardware
} No Virtual machine modification
} Kernel mode integration and supports all hypervisor features for data resilience
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} As data moves between VM2 and the LUN (shown with gold arrows), the FVP layer acts as a read and write-back cache while also mirroring the write-back data to another host node (shown with a white arrow).
} This is done over the vMotion network by default, but you can change this to use a different network, or make a dedicated network, if desired.
} If the virtualization administrator or DRS migrates VM2 from host ESXi A to B with a vMotion, the flash will already contain the hot write-back data and performance should remain relatively high.
} In the case of write-through data, FVP will allow the host to read from a peer host’s flash tier to avoid going back to the SAN until the local flash has warmed up.
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THANK YOU.
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QUESTIONS?