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©2012 Tintri, Inc. All rights reserved. w w w . t i n t r i . c o m
VDI Solutions GuideINTRODUCTION
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©2012 Tintri, Inc. All rights reserved. w w w . t i n t r i . c o m
VDI Solutions GuideINTRODUCTION
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INTRODUCTION
The promise of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is not new. For several years, storage and virtualization companies have been
trumpeting the benefits of VDI as a salve for everything from centralized data management and increased user-level security to
rapid workstation provisioning and increased productivity in the lab.
However, if you are like many organizations that have attempted to deploy VDI using existing storage architectures, you are
likely feeling the pain of complexity, inefficiency, and latency, all combining to either stall or seriously hinder your VDI initiative.
Whether it is the complexity of defining IO-level VM needs before you’ve deployed a single desktop instance, the sluggish boot
times and usage hiccups across your user base, or the rising costs of having to buy more and more disk to support your storage
needs, there’s a good chance the expected benefits of VDI are considerably less than anticipated. But the root of these problems
is not VDI itself; rather, it is the inadequate storage architectures being used to support it.
When deployed on top of a storage solution that is fully aware of the VMs running on it, VDI not only becomes manageable; it
becomes robust, scalable, and powerful. The key to success in deploying VDI lies in the intelligence of the storage and file system
supporting it. Therefore, choosing the right solution and understanding what questions to ask when researching VDI are critical
for any savvy organization.
In this VDI Solution Guide, Tintri will give you unique perspectives on VDI from the vendor and customer viewpoint, as well as
questions to ask and points to consider when deploying VDI in your organization.
• Our VDI Whitepaper will give you an in-depth look at the technical requirements of a proper VDI deployment, with a
discussion of product features and functionality to keep top-of-mind.
• Our VDI Case Study will discuss how one organization solved their VDI challenges using a completely new approach to
storage, saving time, money, and needless cycles.
• Our Top 7 Challenges for VDI Deployments is a quick reference guide to consult when doing an initial review of
storage architectures that promise to support and accelerate VDI.
The benefits of a VDI solution architecture that handles the real-world storage needs of today’s quickly scaling organizations are
clear and achievable. To unlock the real potential of VDI inside your organization, be sure to address these important points.
Introduction
VDI Solutions GuideTHE TOP SEVEN STORAGE CHALLENGES
FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT
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THE TOP SEVEN STORAGE CHALLENGES FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT
AND HOW TO ELIMINATE THEM WITH TINTRI VMSTORE
Deploying virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) using traditional storage arrays presents challenges for storage and VM admins.
What’s worse, these issues can have significant long-term ramifications for cost and functionality (not to mention job security).
Tintri VMstore eliminates these barriers and provides simple, fast and efficient storage, purpose-built for VDI.
Let’s take a look at the top seven challenges in today’s VDI environments and how they can be overcome with Tintri VMstore.
Buying more storage than you need: Storage is at the heart of VDI. Cost per desktop is often cited as a barrier to
VDI adoption. The two major factors for cost overruns with legacy storage-based VDI are:
a. Capital costs: To guarantee VDI performance, many companies overprovision storage with hundreds of disks,
installing far more capacity than they need. As demand increases, this quickly becomes cost-prohibitive.
b. Operational costs: Overprovisioning creates a larger storage footprint, increasing management, space, power,
and cooling expenses.
Tintri solution: One 3U Tintri VMstore appliance has the capacity and performance to support up to 1,000 VMs, dramatically
reducing capital and operational costs, and the need for rack space, power and cooling. High VM density fundamentally
changes the economics of storage.
Desktop performance and user experience: Storage IO performance — low latency and consistent
performance — is critical to VDI. Legacy storage systems fail because:
a. A good end user experience and adequate performance in the face of boot storms, antivirus storms, image
refreshing and recomposing requires overprovisioning.
b. VDI produces small, random write-intensive IO (typically a 20/80 read/write mix) in steady state and bursts
of IO during peak workloads for short periods. Storage arrays with flash as read-cache can’t deliver
consistent performance.
Tintri solution: Tintri VMstore appliances leverage flash as first-class storage for writes and reads, rather than as bolt-on read
cache. Tintri’s intelligent working-set analysis services 99 percent of read and write IO from flash at sub millisecond latency,
providing consistent performance to meet peak and unanticipated IO workloads.
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The Top Ten Storage Challenges for VDI Deployment
VDI Solutions GuideTHE TOP SEVEN STORAGE CHALLENGES
FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT
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Deployment and management is hard: Operational simplicity is key to managing and scaling storage for VDI.
Traditional SAN and NAS arrays require:
a. Complex management as more desktops come online. Admins must continually manage RAID groups, LUNs,
volumes and multiple tiers of storage, making large VDI environments almost impossible to manage.
b. Painstaking, manual monitoring and troubleshooting. General-purpose arrays lack visibility into VM
performance, making monitoring and troubleshooting time-consuming.
Tintri solution: Tintri VMstore can be set up and configured in minutes. Tintri’s VM-aware storage manages at the VM and
vDisk level; there are no LUNs, volumes or other storage objects to manage. Tintri VMstore provides per-VM and per-vDisk
performance and capacity metrics for granular monitoring and simple troubleshooting.
Complex storage architectures won’t scale: Most projects start out with small VDI installations and grow
incrementally, so simple storage scalability is a must. Traditional storage arrays face two scalability challenges:
a. Architecture designs can’t be scaled easily. Deployment architecture designed for a 500 seat VDI pilot using
legacy modular storage systems won’t work for a 5,000 seat production environment.
b. Maintenance and management is complex and makes scaling VDI cumbersome.
Tintri solution: With Tintri, VDI storage scales easily to support thousands of users by adding VMstore appliances just as
compute resources are scaled by adding ESX hosts.
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“From the pilot we conducted with VMware View running on vSphere, we realized that our existing storage would
not cost-effectively scale to support our VDI deployment” said William Earles. “Installation of the Tintri T540 appliance
was very simple and within the hour we had deployed VMware View linked-clone desktop VMs,” said Earles. “Most
importantly, we are able to deploy virtual desktops at less than half the cost of physical desktops, which is
crucial given our budget constraints,” said Earles.
– William Earles
Director of Infrastructure Services, Yavapai College
VDI Solutions GuideTHE TOP SEVEN STORAGE CHALLENGES
FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT
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Architecting VDI solutions is complex: With legacy storage systems, architecting, provisioning and maintaining
end-to-end solutions for large VDI environments requires many hours of administration.
a. Best practices for VDI storage architectures using a traditional SAN or NAS means multiple datastores for
storing base and replica images, OS disk, persistent disk and disposable disk on different storage tiers. This
complexity makes the process error-prone.
b. Provisioning and maintenance, such as creating clone VMs, require careful orchestration to ensure storage
resources are not overrun.
Tintri solution: With Tintri, storage architecture is simple. Each VMstore appliance appears as one datastore with intelligent
automatic data placement, eliminating the need for multiple datastores.
Highly inefficient snapshots for data protection: A major consideration in VDI is data protection. This makes
storage vital in large-scale VDI with thousands of VMs. Storage architectures designed for physical workloads with
volume-level snapshots suffer from:
a. Inefficient storage utilization as hundreds of VMs in a volume are snapshotted when only a few actually need to be.
b. Cumbersome recovery procedures for a single VM.
Tintri solution: Tintri VMstore appliances provide automated data protection using per-VM space-efficient snapshots with no
performance impact.
VM consolidation and the best ROI: Storage consolidation for various use cases — VDI, infrastructure VMs,
databases etc. — reduces costs and increases ROI. Legacy storage systems lack per-VM control and suffer from “noisy
neighbor” problems that call for overprovisioning and separate storage systems for different workloads, preventing
greater consolidation.
Tintri solution: Tintri’s VM-aware storage provides performance isolation and QoS on per-virtual disk and per-VM basis to
prevent spikes from a handful of VMs from causing disruptions. This VM-aware intelligence helps increase consolidation,
providing the best ROI possible.
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“We were blown away by how many IOPS were needed for our VDI deployment,” said Ryan Makamson. “Existing
storage systems became the bottleneck,” Makamson said. “Since implementing T540 for VDI, we don’t have
performance bottlenecks,” said Makamson. “Tintri allowed me to deploy and run VMware View as it was
intended, and with VMs running on Tintri are faster than my laptop.”
– Ryan Makamson
WSU systems administrator.
VDI Solutions GuideYavapai College Case Study
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6Yavapai Case Study
YAVAPAI ENROLLS STUDENTS IN COST-EFFECTIVE
VDI SOULTION WITH TINTRI
OVERVIEW
Yavapai College (YC) is a community college in Arizona established to
provide high quality, convenient, and cost-effective learning opportunities
for the diverse populations of Yavapai County. Across its six campuses, YC
enrolls more than 15,000 students.
YC serves a large county with students commuting from more than 50 miles
away. YC wanted to virtualize student desktops to deliver a more accessible,
cost-effective, and secure environment while preserving the same positive user
experience as a physical desktop infrastructure. YC found through a proof-of
concept that their existing storage would not be able to provide adequate
performance for a large-scale virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment.
KEY CUSTOMER CHALLENGES
Yavapai College deployed traditional storage systems for infrastructure
server VMs. “We are a long-time VMware customer and have virtualized
most of our server environment except for couple of large databases,” said
William Earles, YC’s director of infrastructure services. With experience in
virtualization, YC wanted to deploy virtual desktops to improve access to
services for students. “From the pilot we conducted with VMware View
running on vSphere, we realized that our existing storage would not cost-
effectively scale to support our VDI deployment,” Earles said.
One of the major considerations for the VDI project was to provide a user
experience on par with physical desktops. “Adobe Photoshop and streaming
video applications are heavily used and delivering a quality experience meant
we needed ample performance from our storage system,” said Earles.
Management complexity with traditional storage systems was also an issue.
“We were looking for a simple plug-and-play management for the VDI
storage” said Earles. “From the pilot project, I could see that setting up LUNs,
creating multiple datastores, zoning, and ongoing maintenance would have
been a huge issue for a large-scale deployment on traditional storage.”
TINTRI SOLUTION
YC was excited to leverage Tintri’s flash-based solution for the VDI deployment.
“We certainly wanted to conduct a large-scale pilot using our most demanding
desktop applications to prove Tintri’s fit in our VDI installation,” said Earles.
HIGHLIGHTS
INDUSTRY
Higher Education
VIRTUALIZATION ENVIRONMENT
• VMware® vSphere™ 5.0
• VMware® View 5.0
• HP DL585 servers for vSphere hosts
• Prior to Tintri: VMFS datastores on
NetApp FAS3240 systems and EMC
CX 300 series
VM PROFILE
• Primary student desktops
KEY CHALLENGES
• Reduce cost of desktop deployments
with virtualization
• Deliver a good user experience for
streaming video and photo
processing software
• Manage the complexity of
traditional storage
TINTRI SOLUTION
Tintri VMstore™ T540 dual-controller 13.5TB
storage appliance for serving hundreds of
IO-intensive virtual desktops.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
• Able to deploy virtual desktops at less
than half the cost of physical desktops
• Able to support more than 500 desktop
VMs on a single 3U appliance
• Ease of provisioning and managing VMs
VDI Solutions GuideYavapai College Case Study
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At its Prescott campus, YC deployed a Tintri T540 system that provided
13.5TB usable capacity in a single datastore for serving virtual desktops.
“Installation of the Tintri T540 appliance was very simple and within the
hour we had deployed VMware View linked-clone desktop VMs,” said
Earles. “The pilot test showed that we could easily deploy more than 500
virtual desktops with performance to spare.”
CUSTOMER BENEFITS
“We knew going in what we wanted and the Tintri T540 appliance is able to
handle about 30 percent more desktops than we expected,” said Earles. “We
are able to run the VDI environment smoothly and provide user experience
that is on-par or better than with physical desktops,” said Earles. “Most
importantly, we are able to deploy virtual desktops at less than half the cost of
physical desktops, which is crucial given our budget constraints,” said Earles.
“From our experience, I know we will be able to run even more VMs on the
Tintri appliance. I know this may not be such great news for them, but it will
reduce our cost per desktop even further,” said Earles. “I know we will be
memory bound on our vSphere hosts before we max out the T540 system.”
“Day-to-day administration of the system is very minimal and Tintri’s intuitive GUI
significantly simplifies administration,” said Earles. “Tintri’s VM-level management
abstraction lets us keep tabs on resource consumption for each individual desktop
and proactively address potential problems and plan for growth,” said Earles.
LOOKING FOR TINTRI IN THE FUTURE
“Given the tremendous success with Tintri VMstore in our initial VDI
deployment, we look forward to virtualizing staff desktops as well,” said
Earles. “One feature I would like to see from Tintri is native cloning at VM
level. It would add tremendous value in creating persistent desktops required
for staff. I know it is on their roadmap,” he said.
SUMMARY
Performance, cost-effectiveness, and management simplicity of a storage
system is the key foundation for successful large-scale VDI projects
with hundreds or thousands of VMs. Tintri VMstore fully exploits flash
performance, simplifying deployment of hundreds of VMs in a small
footprint with the ability to easily manage at per-desktop granularity. Cost
effective performance combined with ease of management allowed Yavapai
College to successfully deploy a VDI solution well within their budget.
CUSTOMER SUCESS
“We are able to deploy virtual desktops at less than half the cost of physical desktops, which is crucial given our budget constraints. At the same time, we are able to run the VDI environment smoothly and provide user experience that is on-par or better than with physical desktops.”
– William Earles
Director of Infrastructure Services
VDI Solutions GuideTechnical White Paper
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8Tintri for VDI DeploymentTechnical White Paper
Tintri for VDI DeploymentsTECHINICAL WHITE PAPER
bySaradhi Sreegiriraju
Director, Product Management
VDI Solutions GuideTechnical White Paper
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page 10 InTenDeD auDIence
Page 10 InTroDucTIon
Page 10 common VDI comPonenTs
Page 12 sTorage challenges In VDI enVIronmenTs
Page 13 Vm-aware sTorage for VDI
Page 13 easy To seT uP aDmInIsTer
Page 13 sImPle anD raPID ProVIsIonIng
Page 14 granular anD scalable snaPshoTs
Page 15 Performance anD caPacITy fuel gauge
Page 16 Performance DashboarD
Page 17 InsTanT boTTleneck VIsualIzaTIon
Page 18 PreDIcTable Performance
Page 19 IncremenTal scalabIlITy
Page 20 DaTa-cenTer fooTPrInT
Page 20 conclusIon
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INTENDED AUDIENCE
IT managers and administrators will find solutions to common challenges with VDI deployments.
INTRODUCTION
As users increasingly become mobile and require remote access to desktops and applications, IT organizations struggle to deliver
cheap, secure and accessible environments.
Companies have reduced both the capital and operating costs of data centers by virtualizing enterprise applications like Exchange
and SQL Server. At the same time, they’re able to provide higher levels of service to end users. Desktop virtualization, or virtual
desktop infrastructure (VDI), is meant to deliver similar benefits to the desktop.
However, virtualizing desktops poses very different challenges. Shared storage infrastructure cost, performance, and manageability
of the storage layer are among the most commonly cited obstacles to successful VDI implementations. This white paper looks
at the various components of a VDI solution and the storage challenges of deploying VDI, and explores why the unique features
and functionality of Tintri VMstore™ are a perfect fit for VDI deployments.
COMMON VDI COMPONENTS
The following list provides some examples of the architectural components that are common in many VDI deployments:
• Hypervisor: VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer
• Centralized desktop management tools: VMware View Composer and Citrix Machine Creation Services
• Connection broker and desktop assignment/management: VMware View and Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller
Note: Although this white paper uses VMware View terminology and assumes the underlying hypervisor is VMware vSphere,
Tintri VMstore can be used just as easily with XenDesktop using vSphere as the underlying hypervisor.
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Virtual desktop images are hosted on a storage system, which also provides storage for data generated by users of the virtual
desktops. Figure 1, below, shows an example of a VMware View deployment with the storage component circled. Storage is at the
center of VDI deployments, and is often a performance bottleneck for concentrated workloads on hundreds of virtual desktops.
Figure 1: VMware View Deployment
Source: Courtesy of VMware, Inc.
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STORAGE CHALLENGES IN VDI ENVIRONMENTS
Virtualization poses challenges to legacy shared storage systems, which are not intrinsically aware of the virtual environments
they support.
Traditional storage systems:
• Commonly require overprovisioning of commodity storage components, leading to unnecessary capacity and a large
footprint that increases both CAPEX and OPEX.
• Require expertise in deployment and management of additional complexities, such as RAID groups, LUNs, and various
file systems.
• Do not provide clear indicators of performance headroom to accommodate additional growth.
• Lack VM-level statistics to identify issues with individual desktops.
• Are not designed for the concentrated and highly randomized read and write requirements of VDI workloads.
Figure 2 shows the complexity of a typical VDI deployment using legacy storage system architectures, contrasted with the
simplicity of Tintri’s VM-aware storage.
Figure 2: Legacy Storage Architectures vs. Tintri
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VM-AWARE STORAGE FOR VDI
Virtualization owes its success in transforming data centers to the power of VM abstraction. A VM may run on a generic pool of
shared hardware resources, and its CPU and memory usage are easily monitored and modified. Unfortunately, storage for VMs
has increasingly become a bottleneck in server virtualization environments. It poses even greater challenges for VDI environments
with hundreds of virtual desktops provisioned on a single storage system.
Tintri VMstore overcomes these limits. The Tintri VMstore file system is designed from the ground up for VMs. It uses VM
abstractions — VMs and virtual disks — in place of conventional storage abstractions such as volumes, LUNs or files. Purpose-
built for VMs and focused specifically on the problems of VM storage, Tintri VMstore provides management at the same level of
abstraction as the rest of the virtual infrastructure.
Tintri VMstore has a number of capabilities that make it highly suitable for large-scale VDI deployments. The next sections
explore each of those features and functionality in the context of VDI deployments.
EASY TO SET UP AND ADMINISTER
Tintri VMstore can be set up and configured in minutes. No complex storage configuration is required. Once the appliance is
powered on, it’s as simple as connecting it to VMware vCenter Server™ and provisioning VMs on the VMstore. Each node is a
single datastore, making it easy to map to VMware vSphere™ hosts. What’s more, when you add new VMs, you won’t need to
worry about configuring new LUNs, volumes, RAID groups or any other complex storage objects — since there are none.
BENEFIT: Simplified installation reduces installation, support, and maintenance costs substantially.
SIMPLE AND RAPID PROVISIONING
Provisioning and maintaining large number of VMs in VDI environments using legacy storage systems is extremely cumbersome,
requiring many hours of administration. Best practices for legacy storage-based architectures dictate creating multiple datastores
for storing base and replica images, OS disk, persistent disk, and disposable disk on different tiers. These best practices make
provisioning and managing the lifecycle of VMs very complex and error-prone.
With Tintri, each VMstore appliance appears as one datastore with intelligent automatic data placement in high-performance
flash storage, eliminating the need to manage multiple datastores for different needs. Hundreds of space-efficient and high-
performance VM clones can be created from template VMs in minutes, drastically reducing administrative overhead. VMstore
cloning workflows automatically add the virtual desktop VMs to vCenter so they can be provisioned into pools with desktop
management tools such as VMware View.
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BENEFITS:
1) The space efficiency and seamless integration of Tintri VMstore’s clones greatly reduce administrative overhead for
provisioning and maintaining VDI environments.
2) High performance of clone VMs enable a consistent user experience on par with or better than physical desktops.
GRANULAR AND SCALABLE SNAPSHOTS
One of the pillars of VDI is the promise of lower costs through high storage utilization. Traditional shared storage architectures
provide snapshots of storage objects rather than actual VMs. Best practices recommendations vary from containing hundreds
of VMs in individual storage volumes in order to create snapshots, to creating one LUN per VM. These snapshot technologies
lead to inefficient storage utilization, as hundreds of VMs with varying change rates are often snapshotted at once.
Tintri VMstore’s unique space-efficient and granular per-VM snapshots allow administrators to create snapshots of individual
VMs and quickly recover data or entire VMs from snapshots. VMstore appliances support up to 128,000 snapshots for scalable
data protection. Data protection management is also simplified with default snapshot schedules that protect every VM
automatically, while custom schedules on a per-VM basis can be used to tailor data protection needs for specific VMs.
Unlike storage-centric snapshot technologies, Tintri VMstore’s per-VM snapshots make recovery workflows very simple. Files
from individual VMs can be recovered without additional management overhead, dramatically reducing the time to recovery.
BENEFITS:
1) Tintri VMstore’s per-VM, space efficient snapshots provide for quick-recovery of data or entire VMs from snapshots.
2) The large number of snapshots provides scalable protection for hundreds of VMs.
3) Recovery workflows are simplified to meet strict RTOs and SLAs.
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PERFORMANCE AND CAPACITY FUEL GAUGE
A unique “fuel gauge” gives you immediate visibility into both the available storage capacity and performance headroom on any
Tintri VMstore appliance (see Figure 3, below). For the first time, this gives you predictable storage performance with a single,
easy-to-use metric. Two aggregate indicators with drill-down capability let you keep tabs on your VMs. The unique performance
gauge allows users to quickly identify how many more virtual desktops can be deployed on a given VMstore based on the
resources available.
Figure 3: Tintri VMstore Fuel Gauge
BENEFIT: Managing performance is as easy as managing capacity. Administrators can quickly estimate how many more virtual
desktops can be provisioned on a given Tintri VMstore, taking the guesswork and complexity out of provisioning storage for VDI.
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PERFORMANCE DASHBOARD
Tintri VMstore’s dashboard view quickly identifies VMs with the most changes in performance or capacity requirements in the
past seven days (see Figure 4, below). Administrators need not understand how VMs map to the storage components; all they
need to know is the name of the VM. Tintri VMstore manages the details behind the scenes by integrating with vCenter.
Figure 4: Tintri’s Performance Dashboard
The per-VM granularity for tracking performance and space changes allows administrators to keep tabs on desktops that may
be using undue storage resources. The dashboard is arranged to provide a summary view to show the top VMs, making the
information much more readily actionable.
The per-VM performance and space change information also helps administrators in environments that share the Tintri VMstore
for hosting both server and virtual desktop workloads. Administrators can immediately see the changes in storage resource
needs of the different categories of VMs running on a VMstore, and ensure that different workloads do not affect each other.
BENEFIT: Provides administrators with a quick way to monitor end user experience on a per-VM basis.
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INSTANT BOTTLENECK VISUALIZATION
Tintri VMstore visualizes per-VM performance bottlenecks for instant diagnosis. Performance troubleshooting is one of the most
tedious VM management tasks. With Tintri VMstore, administrators can quickly see a performance and storage utilization profile
on a per-VM and virtual disk basis, and have instant visibility into latency from the guest OS layer to the storage layer (see Figure
5, below). They can see per-VM or per-vDisk latency at any infrastructure layer, identify the source of performance issues, and
take immediate action. VMstore also maintains historical latency data automatically, giving administrators a graphical seven-day
view of performance.
Per-VM and virtual disk performance visualization allows VDI administrators to quickly troubleshoot on a per-desktop basis to
provide end users with unparalleled service.
Figure 5: Instant Bottleneck Visualization
BENEFIT: Visualizing per-VM performance and latency allows administrators to quickly troubleshoot issues and provide consistent
service levels.
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PREDICTABLE PERFORMANCE
Disk access latency and IOPS performance requirements are magnified in large virtual desktop deployments because of the
number of VMs. These can become highly unpredictable in a legacy disk-based storage system. Flash performance, in contrast, is
much easier to characterize, is location-independent, and is much more uniform. Legacy storage systems must employ complex
caching and tiering technologies to take advantage of flash, creating ongoing administrative headaches for the storage and
virtualization teams.
Tintri eliminates traditional tiering by automating placement and writing directly to flash when appropriate. The Tintri file system
is designed specifically to deliver flash performance without requiring manual configuration or VM placement. It deduplicates
and compresses data in flash using a very small block size to provide much larger effective capacity. For example, the base image
for a VMware-linked clone can be entirely cached or pinned in flash to service all read IOs from flash directly, thereby providing
low and uniform latency even during boot, log-on and application launch storm-type workloads, even with hundreds of virtual
desktops.
VDI deployments also produce small random-write IOs that are not suitable for legacy disk-based storage systems. Tintri VMstore
services the write IOs directly from cost-effective multilevel cell (MLC) flash with its innovative file system. This solves random-
write IO amplification issues with MLC that previously were unsuitable for enterprise environments. Figure 6 shows the consistent
submillisecond latency achieved with a Tintri VMstore at high IOPS and throughput.
Figure 6: Datastore Performance
The Tintri file system minimizes swaps to disk with automated placement, to ensure only active data is kept in flash. The typical
mixture of hot and cold data in virtualized environments often include minimally-active or periodically busy virtual desktops. The
Tintri file system adapts to periodic workloads to ensure they are not evicted from flash during idle periods, and provides good
read/write performance even for VMs that reside mainly on disk.
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The VM-aware nature of the file system allows Tintri to provide performance isolation for each VM. By automating data
placement and keeping the most active data sets in flash, VMstore provides QoS on a per-virtual disk and per-VM basis. The
Tintri file system automatically uses the combination of flash and disk that best suits the activity of the VM, adjusting it over
time to prevent variations in a few desktop VM IO patterns from causing disruptions for other VMs. This can appreciably help
VDI installations to prevent runaway desktops from using up system performance, and provide consistent performance to all
desktops hosted on the system.
BENEFITS:
• Much larger effective flash capacity accommodates higher VM density, and provides a fast response time and end-user
desktop experience.
• Write-intensive VDI workloads are serviced from flash, ensuring consistent end-user desktop experience.
• Minimally active desktops are not evicted from flash, providing a consistent desktop experience.
• Provides consistent performance to end-users to meet service-level agreements, without the need to overprovision
storage to meet peak and unanticipated IO workloads.
INCREMENTAL SCALABILITY
Hypervisor administrators have perfected deploying incremental hosts for increasing CPU, network and memory resources to
scale compute resources. The hosts can be managed from vCenter as a cluster.
Tintri VMstore integrates software and hardware capability into a field-serviceable storage appliance, built from the ground up to
run VMs. The Tintri file system is designed to take full advantage of flash, multicore CPUs and 10GbE to deliver the performance
needed for hundreds of virtualized desktop environments.
Traditional SAN-based storage architectures typically map 500GB LUNs as datastores, creating a large number of storage objects.
Each Tintri VMstore appears as a single 13.5 TB NFS datastore per appliance.
Tintri reduces the number of storage objects to manage by a substantial factor. With Tintri, even large VDI deployments can start
out using a single datastore. As the environment grows, the storage can scale incrementally simply by adding additional Tintri
VMstore appliances. Because each appliance appears as a datastore, it’s easy to manage them seamlessly from vCenter.
BENEFIT: Tintri VMstore can scale to meet both capacity and performance demands together, reducing CAPEX and OPEX.
VDI Solutions GuideTechnical White Paper
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DATA-CENTER FOOTPRINT
Tintri VMstore is designed to fully capitalize on the most cost-effective flash technology available. The Tintri file system integrates
flash as a first-class storage medium rather than as a bolt-on cache to fully leverage continued improvements in flash price and
performance. MLC flash — combined with inline deduplication, compression, and a unique flash/disk file system — enables Tintri
to provide 13.5 TB of flash performance in a small 3U footprint, keeping the total per-VM acquisition cost (CAPEX) very affordable.
The small footprint of the appliances saves substantially in operating expenses for power, cooling and floor space.
BENEFIT: The small footprint of Tintri systems provides substantial savings from reduced rack space, power and cooling, thereby
reducing the cost of storage per virtual desktop.
CONCLUSION
Desktop virtualization can provide huge benefits in streamlining the IT infrastructure, reducing costs, and increasing security and
compliance, while making desktops and applications more accessible.
However, storage remains the primary obstacle to deploying and maintaining virtual desktop infrastructures. Tintri VMstore, with
its innovative VM-aware file system, leverages cost-effective MLC flash to deliver high performance in a very small footprint that
can scale incrementally to meet growing needs. Tintri’s file system uses deduplication, compression, snapshots, clones and thin
provisioning to provide the unparalleled VM density required for deploying virtual desktops. Tintri VMstore allows administrators to
overcome the complexity, performance and cost obstacles preventing organizations from deploying VDI.