© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 1 © 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 1

Accelerate Citrix XenDesktop with Cisco UCS and Cisco UCS Storage Accelerator

Ravi Balakrishnan, Ashok Rajagopalan

With Intel® Xeon® processor

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 2

VDI: Impact of Infrastructure

Average Cost per Virtual Desktop

(US$)

$160

$125

$40

$150

$125

$50

Storage

Server

Networking

Endpoint

Broker

Licensing

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Desktop Virtualization Storage

Capacity Storage Performance Storage

What: User data and profiles

How: Storage services

Where: Shared storage

What: Linked clones

How: IOPS

Where: Server flash memory storage

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Desktop Virtualization Storage

What: User data and profiles

How: Storage services

Where: Shared storage

What: Linked clones

How: IOPS

Where: Server flash memory storage

Capacity

Storage

Performance

Storage

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Shared Storage Challenges

Cost of IOPS

SAN and storage manageability

Lumpiness for scale (horizontal

scalability)

Predictability

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Benefits of Server Caching for VDI

Lower cost of IOPS

Improved performance:

IOPS and latency

Server-based

manageability

Smaller blocks for

scalability

Predictable

performance at scale

Less power consumption

and floor space

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Scalable Design

Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions Portfolio (Lowest cost per Desktop with Optimized UCS Infrastructure)

Data Center Designs/Architectures

Segment

• Scale-out environment

with shared storage

• Targeted for medium &

large scale environments

SMB

Mid-Market Enterprise

Service Provider

500 Seats 20000 Seats 5000 Seats 2000 Seats

Cisco Desktop Virtualization Designs

On-Board Design

• Integrated Solution with

Tier-0 Storage on Server

• Targeted for non-

persistent desktops

Simplified Design

• “Appliance” config with

collapsed n/w layer with

shared storage

• Targeted for medium

scale environments

Converged

Infrastructure

• Turnkey Solutions with

integrated compute stacks

• Targeted for medium & large

scale environments

7

With Intel® Xeon® processor

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Traditional Architecture

Virtual Desktops Platform + OS

and Hypervisor

Server Storage

Controller Storage Media

• Read and write operations serviced by the storage array

• For IOPS-intensive workloads, backlogs and serialization occur at the access fabric, storage controller, and

storage media

• Best read and write performance would be read from and write commit on the storage controller write cache

• Queue depths on the controller serialize IOPS

Write latency = ~ 600 microseconds to 15 milliseconds (ms)

Read latency = ~ 600 microseconds to 10 ms

Network

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Server Tier-0 Architecture

Virtual Desktops Platform + OS

and Hypervisor

Server Storage

Controller Storage Media

Write latency = ~ 600 microseconds to 15 milliseconds (ms)

Read latency = ~ 600 microseconds to 10 ms

• Reads and writes serviced by Cisco UCS® storage accelerator

(PCIe flash memory)

• 10 times more IOPS compared to 20 times more for SSDs

behind a RAID controller

• Consistent performance of random read-write operations

• Queue depth does not matter

Cisco UCS storage accelerator-based solution can

reduce average read latency by 5 times compared to

enterprise shared storage

Cisco UCS storage accelerator-based solution can

reduce average read latency by 5 times compared to

enterprise shared storage

Network

With Intel® Xeon® processor

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Cisco UCS Architecture with Citrix

B200 M3 Blade Server

VDI clones x 140+ per

blade (streamed from

Citrix PVS vDisk)

• Cisco UCS® server with 8 GB of RAM,

and 2 CPUs

• OS caches vDisk file data at the block level

• 64-bit OS provides better caching performance:

typically up to 1000 streams per server

Citrix

XenDesktop

5.6

Brokers

E1

4GB E1

4GB E1

4GB E1

4GB Volumes (mounted on flash memory LUNs

assigned to hypervisors)

(Read-Write I/O)

E1 virtual disk total 4

GB (per clone)

Microsoft Windows

swap file placed here

automatically by

Citrix PVS target

device agent

Citrix PVS write cache

Write cache deleted at

virtual machine

shutdown

Citrix PVS 6.1 farm

(provides resilience

and load balancing

for vDisk stream)

vDisk1

vDisk1

vDisk1

vDisks synchronized

manually on each

Citrix PVS server

(vDisk

Standard mode)

Set to Cache on

Device Disk

Provisioning

Server Farm

With Intel® Xeon® processor

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Economics of IOPS

* Includes industry-standard enterprise storage to support up to 2000 desktops with 1-year support (US$286,000), 4 ports of Cisco Nexus® 5000 Series

Switches, and 4 storage port licenses for Cisco UCS fabric interconnect, all at ASP

** Includes Cisco UCS and Fusion-io 785-GB cards at ASP

$0

$50,000

$100,000

$150,000

$200,000

$250,000

$300,000

SAN withEnterprise Storage*

UCS StorageAccelerators: UCSFusion IO 785GB**

$294,064

$147,000

Storage Costs for 2000 Virtual Desktops For 2000-desktop solution, Cisco UCS® and

Fusion-io flash memory solution can reduce

storage costs by 50% compared to standard

enterprise shared storage

A single Cisco UCS Fusion-io 785-GB card can

provide up to 500,000 writes (512 KB): about

10 times more write IOPS than typical shared

storage for 2000 desktops

A single Cisco UCS Fusion-io 785-GB card can

provide up to 100,000 reads (512 KB): about

3 times more write IOPS than typical shared

storage for 2000 desktops

½ the cost

With Intel® Xeon® processor

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Power Consumption and Floor Space

* Assumes that a typical 15,000-rpm SAS drive on Industry-standard enterprise storage consumes 8W, and assumes 20% additional overhead for

controller, shelves, and management nodes

** Cisco UCS and Fusion-io 785-GB card typically consumes 20W, and on average 130 virtual desktops are supported on Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade

Server

• Cisco UCS® storage accelerator is 16 times more energy efficient per virtual desktop

compared to typical enterprise storage

• Cisco UCS storage accelerator consumes no incremental floor space for the solution

0.00 0.50 1.00 1.50 2.00 2.50

UCS Storage Accelerator: UCS Fusion IO 785GB**

Industry Standard Shared Storage*

0.15

2.4

Watts per Virtual Desktop

Power Consumption per Virtual Desktop

With Intel® Xeon® processor

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 13

Call To Action

Desktop Virtualization

Design Guides

www.cisco.com/go/vdi

www.cisco.com/go/citrix

www.cisco.com/go/vdidesigns

www.cisco.com/go/designzone

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Receive 4 stamps by visiting our demos and a theater session to enter the daily drawing

• Demo #1: Accelerate Citrix XenDesktop with Cisco UCS and Cisco

UCS Storage Accelerator

• Demo #2: Simplify Citrix XenApp with Cisco UCS and Cisco VM-FEX

• Demo #3: Cisco UCS and CloudPlatform

• Demo #4: Cisco UCS Manager

• Demo #5: Cisco Office in a Box for Branch and Remote Office

Deployments

• Demo #6: Collaboration-Ready Virtual Workspace on Any Device

• Demo #7: Cisco Desktop Virtualization Automation

• Demo #8: GPU Enabled Rich Media on Cisco UCS

• Demo #9: Secure, Scalable, Optimized Virtual Experience

• Theatre Presentation

Cisco at Citrix Synergy Passport Program

Questions?

With Intel® Xeon® processor

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Thank You

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