vdi storage challenges_presented at vmug_toronto 2014 by scalar decisions


Introduction about Scalar Decisions

VDI Challenges

Storage for VDI

Vendor Solutions

Q & A


Introduction


Background in architecting mission-critical

data centre infrastructure

Founded in 2004

$105M in FY13

Revenues

Nationwide Presence120 Employees

Nationwide

25% Growth YoYToronto | Vancouver

Ottawa | Calgary | London

Greater than 1:1

technical:sales ratio


The country’s most

skilled IT infrastructure

specialists, focused on

security, performance

and control tools

Delivering infrastructure

services which support

core applications


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?


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


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


Design Validation Benefits


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


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?


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


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


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


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


Vendor solutions


Hybrid Arrays


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


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


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


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


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


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


Hyperconverged


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


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


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)


NDFSPooled resources

10G

bps

Eth

ern

et

ND

FS

SINGLE NODE

Compute:16 Cores

Storage:

Flash: 800GB SSD

HDD: 4TB

Controller: Nutanix Storage

controller


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


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)


Flash Hypervisor Software


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


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.


THANK YOU.


QUESTIONS?

vdi storage challenges_presented at vmug_toronto 2014 by scalar decisions

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