Storage Architectures for VDI Environments

Vinay Rao

9/29/2011

Traditional Data center architectures

• Compute farms connected to storage via SANs.

• Mid to high-end shared storage arrays with fiber channel or iSCSI.

• NAS filers accessed via NFS/CIFS protocol.• Load balancers, cloud management

platforms, etc.• Virtual machines sharing the FC or iSCSI

HBA devices.

Challenges for VDI environment

• Data management of LUNs/mount points does not scale.

• Hotspotting due to application and boot storms.

• Virtual machine IO blending causes drop in performance from 30 to 50%

• VDI needs shared storage infrastructure skyrocketing costs to 5-15$/GB.

• Scaling to potentially peta bytes of data and millions of Virtual desktops.

Solutions to storage issues

• Golden master copy of boot images/application images on an SSD tier.

• Efficient rapid snapshotting and cloning by using hypervisor services.

• Abandoning SANs and NASs and using a Distributed file systems approach.

VM density of storage protocols

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New architectures for cloud VDI

• Virsto One– No SAN or NAS required. No IO blending.

– Hypervisor Software only solution.

– Redundant blocks across several nodes.

– Storage VM on each server manages.

– Snapshot/Cloning capability.

New Architectures for Cloud VDI

• Nutanix– No LUNs/Mount points/SANs/NFS filers

– Appliance model, uses SSDs built-in.

– Distribute the storage metadata for performance and HA properties.

– Storage auto-tiering.