Virsto for Virtual Desktops (VDI)
Posted Tuesday, April 05, 2011 in News, Technology 1 comment
At the risk of blowing my credibility in the first sentence of this post I am making the following statement: I believe 2011 will (finally) be the year of VDI. After so many false starts and false promises, what has changed to make this year the year VDI gets real momentum?
I believe the key factors are now in place that will drive the market to seriously consider, and successfully implement VDI this year:
- Windows 7 Refresh – The positive market reception to Windows 7, and the end of support for Windows XP, provides a compelling event for IT organizations to consider migration options.
- VDI solutions have continued to mature, and now support key end user requirements such as high performance network graphics, PC-over-IP delivery, and hybrid desktop delivery options across desktop and mobile devices, with acceptable application latency and performance.
- The cost per virtual desktop is finally getting driven down to levels that compel IT organizations to try this new VDI delivery model, as the cost savings with virtual desktops are finally real and large enough to challenge the status quo.
Delivering a lower cost per virtual desktop is the final, critical piece to making this the long-awaited, much anticipated “year of VDI”.
VDI discussions tend to focus on the sexy topics like high performance network graphics and catchy terms like PC-over-IP. If we look beyond these important subjects and focus on the drivers of cost for virtual desktops, the majority of these costs come from the infrastructure requirements needed to stand up a VDI environment.
A VDI infrastructure is essentially a pool of virtualized servers running VERY large number nearly identical virtual machines. When I say a VERY large number I mean that it is not unusual to have more than a hundred virtual machines per host as opposed to a 10-15 VMs for a common server consolidation scenario. With Windows Server 2008 R2 SP2 Hyper-V now supporting dynamic memory, the VM density required for cost-effective VDI is ready to go.
However, the lion’s share of the cost of the supporting infrastructure is still dominated by the cost of storage. And the cost of storage has little to do with the amount of storage actually required, and everything to do with provisioning to deliver storage performance for the VMs running VDI.
This unpleasant storage performance requirement comes as a surprise to a lot of people who have tried to deploy large-scale VDI implementations.
Hundred virtual machines running on a single host create a severe case of what we at Virsto call the “I/O Blender”; many VM’s acting as if they own all of the host’s resources, not playing nicely with all the other VM’s, grinding I/O throughput to a halt and dramatically reducing overall performance as a result. What makes this problem especially acute is the fact that I/O performance is dominated by small block write operations in the VDI use case. The result is the worst nightmare for modern storage systems and a huge storage price tag for users.
Storage hardware vendors are ready to offer their standard solution: buy more expensive storage to over-provision the environment and try to deliver enough performance to solve the I/O bottleneck. Since server virtualization has taken off, the standard way to solve this performance problem has been to either buy systems with more disk spindles; or pay for the solid state storage (SSD) – which despite the recent reduction in price is still orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional spinning disk solutions. With either approach storage costs will blow your VDI project budget: it is not uncommon for storage to account for $300-$400 per virtual desktop in VDI implementations.
The magic number for cost per virtual desktop seems to be around $500 for successful implementations. With current storage approaches VDI is a non-starter for most IT organizations.
It does not have to be that way. Your existing storage – or inexpensive commodity disk storage – is perfectly capable of handling the challenges of VDI workload provided it is controlled by storage virtualization software designed to handle storage in virtualized environments - Virsto Software.
Over the past 6 months we have been working on software optimized to solve the specific storage challenges in the VDI use case. I am proud to announce that we have succeeded. Virsto VDI changes the economics of storage in virtual desktop deployments running on Hyper-V by optimizing the I/O in virtualized environments, supporting highly consolidated environments, while reducing the storage requirements by up to 90%. Virsto supports Enterprise-scale VDI deployments by delivering tens of thousands of high performance snapshots, Clustering and High Availability fail over through Microsoft DPM, and improves VDI provisioning with support for instant bulk provisioning and grouping operations through Microsoft System Center VMM. By introducing Virsto into your VDI POC and getting dramatically more out of the storage you already have, the storage component of your cost per virtual desktop is dramatically reduced.
I think this really could be the year of VDI.
Comments
David Bieneman 10:55am PST on April 6th, 2011
Additionally, using a product to optimize the user profile can reduce the IOPS load or using a method like NetApp FlexClones, FlashCache and Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity can dramatically lower your CAPEX and increase the users experience to the point that VDI is finally affordable and faster than the PC.
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