VMWARE VIEW – STORAGE CONSIDERATIONS

Calin DAMIAN TANASE

This presentation does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of nobody. It is solely my opinion. This presentation is provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.

You may distribute this presentation freely as long as you keep it unmodifiedCopyright Calin DAMIAN TANASE, Temperfield

AGEN

DAWhy VMware View? What’s driving adoption? Business Drivers

Challenges in a virtual desktop world

Storage challenges for VMware View Environments

Storage – a short introduction

Storage – what we plan for?

Design Considerations

VMware View Architecture

How the challenges may be addressed?

Resources

Storage – a short introduction

Why VMware View? What’s driving adoption? Business Drivers

Simplification/CapEx reductions Device simplification and/or consolidation Faster, rapid deployments

New apps New employee Other rovisioning tasks

OpEx reductions - Lower Cost of Desktop Management Power savings BYO - “bring-your-own-PC” approaches Reduced IT services cost

Reduction of IT staffing costs (or outsourcing costs) Simplified desk-side support Simplified life cycle management.

Ease and speed of OS/application deployments Simplify new HW/OS adoption, Windows 7 migration

Security - All data is maintained within a central datacenter; no data on clients Asset control outside corporate perimeter (“offshoring”) Physical device security Data security/control Desktop disaster recovery plan

VMware View Architecture

Design Considerations

Inputs - to be considered Operational requirements Environment may affect the design (latency, bandwidth, DMZ, firewalls) HA for desktops Business continuity/Disaster recovery Portability and flexibility Networking Security Scalability Monitoring Management User experience & user acceptance

Output – THE Design Solution/Enterprise/Site – wide Architecture Cluster and Server Sizing (! Configuration Maximums) End-point devices Storage Design & Sizing that’s our focus for this presentation etc

Challenges in a virtual desktop world

Objective Some won't see any ROI for at least a few years CPU power - 10/12-core CPUs available; 32-core CPU expected H2 2011 Lots of memory needed in servers – Cisco EMT 48 DIMM slots for 384GB ; 16GB

dimms prices dropping (Moore’s Law) Network Bandwidth – PCoIP improvements; 10G switches price/port dropping bellow

2k eur; accelerators; technology improvements to consider & optimize for virtual channel

3D Risks associated to migration Apps/desktop HW not candidates for VDI; maybe costly migration App-virtualization Licensing Roaming profiles vs. Persona management (personal settings?) Shared centralized infrastructure vs. dedicated hardware And of course STORAGE

Don’t forget to consider Subjective challenges changing the culture and perception that users have developed around “their PCs” ;

user resistance to be considered find ways to get prospective users to actually desire new VDI driven systems first followers?

First Follower – Derek Sivers

Storage – a short introduction

History – open systemsPCI & SCSIShared storage – consolidation trends since the 80th

Shared storage as technology enabler for clusters, DR, etcFC – we got the best from channel and network comm. typesSANsWhat a storage system is doing basically?

Virtualize “local” storage capacity we get LUNs (logical vols) Serving data to clients (servers) from logical constructs (LUNs)

Why is the traditional DDM the “retard child” of IT infrastructuresHow the IT infrastructure “society members” are contributing to integrate the DDMs?For digital cameras we compare by Mp, optical zoom, digital zoom; what’s used for storage systems?How to read a storage subsystem datasheet (iops, SAS/SATA/FC/iSCSI)Common misconceptions about storage systems

Storage – what we plan for?

Size – disk space should be all? How do you characterize the workload to be accommodated?

Sequential/random Cache friendly R/W ratio (i.e. 20% write / 80% read) Block size/io length Iops Io bandwidth/throughput Latency tolerance

How do you define what’s good or bad with performance? Is there a good enough threshold?What happens when you’re not providing enough to consumers?Impact of HW configuration and logical configuration

RAID5 Write penalty scenarioHow do you benchmark?

What may negatively influence your results?Performance management/optimization - One time job or a process to integrate in the business model?MethodologyTools

Storage challenges for VMware View Environments

Desktop images & user data migrated from user devices to the data center stress on centralized storage systems

Large scale View projects huge influx of data that was stored on local machines now needs to be stored and administered centrally

Shared storage infrastructure vs. dedicated to the desktop’s user

Internal bus transport vs. the storage fabric

“Storms” (boot, AV, login) impact for all users? Peaks accommodated into large averages?

Enterprise storage cost/GB vs. commodity DDMs found in desktops ; space management becomes more important

How the challenges may be addressed?

GOOD sizing Performance: iops usually the issue - not capacity nor transport

Assess - Measure & Analyze what you need to accommodate as storage needsWell performed assessments will provide good inputs for design

Stateless /Statefull? How many different golden images do I need? Apps installed or Thinapped? How many unique linked clone VMs are required? Persistent disks or persona management? What are the average and peak IOPS of the desktops? What are the most IO intensive applications? Any unauthorized apps? – undesired impact on sizing

Pilot, Pilot, Pilot and tune the VDI deployment - Lakeside Software / Liquidware Labs

Optimize desktop OS images (see resources)

LSI disk drive for XP; SAS forWindows 7 Turn off drive indexing Defrag the drive – both the image and the VMDK Clean out all system temp files No P2VKeep the image as clean as is possible Disable any unneeded services

Understand technology and use it to your advantage

Storage systems architecture

Tools you use to assess performance

VMware View specifics Linked Clones Tiered storage support & storage overcommitment Master VM image on SSD for stateless Redirect disposables Refresh, Rebalance

In a new architecture old solutions may not be ideal; be open to consider change

Remember: with flexibility/features comes complexity; storage space consumption was easy to determine. We have now Linked Cloning vs. Linked Cloning Thin Provisioned (even Hw Thin Provisioning @storage layer) vs. Full Cloning Thin Provisioned

For a Linked Clones setup you will maybe consider consumption for: master replica & replica delta footprint (refresh @ 50%?) User data disk (if not using roaming profiles/persona management) max log size disposables Overhead .vswp (configured mem, reservations? All VMs powered-on at the same time?)

With tiered storage you need to profile workloads per storage tier i.e. 100% read for replica 40% read; 60% write for LinkedClones disks 30% read; 70% write for Persistend Disks

Resources

Mirror locally myvirtualcloud.net and start reading

VMware View Architecture PlanningVMware View Reference Architecture A guide to large-scale Enterprise VMware View deployments VMware View WAN Reference Architecture This View WAN reference architecture focuses on the WAN link, its attributes, such as bandwidth and latency, and the WAN optimization aspect of the architecture. VMware ThinApp Reference Architecture This VMware ThinApp reference architecture specifically focuses on integration with Active Directory, the use of Distributed File System technology for file shares, and View Composer considerations.Server and Storage Sizing for VMware VDI: A Prescriptive ApproachStorage Basics -- http://vmtoday.com/2009/12/storage-basics-part-i-intro/Jim Moyle’s paper – Windows 7 IOPS for VDI: Deep DiveView 4.5 Stateless Desktop reference architectureWindows 7 Optimization GuideWindows XP Optimization GuideView VDI calculator http://myvirtualcloud.net/?page_id=1076The biggest Linked Clone “IO” Split Study

QUESTIONS?

THANK YOU!