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Posts Tagged ‘VMware View’

I have seen different implementations of read caching in arrays and even inside hosts, just to be able to cope with boot storms of VDI workloads. When using linked clones caching really helps; all the VDIs being booted perform massive reads from a very small portion of the infrastructure: the replica(s). VMware came up with a nice software solution to this: Why not sacrifice some memory inside the vSphere nodes to accommodate read caching there? This is what CBRC (vSphere 5) or Host Caching (View 5.1) is all about. And… It really works!

What happens during a boot storm

First of all, we need to figure out what happens during a boot storm. Even wondered just how much data Read the rest of this entry »

EMC and VMware have published a joined Reference Architecture where an EMC VNX5300 using a minimum configuration of disks squeezes out the required IOPS for a thousand VDI users. That is awesome stuff, but how to go about using and remodeling this RA for your own needs? In this blog post I’ll try to put some numbers to it, both validating and enabling you to resize for your needs.

A very cool use case: VMware View and 1000 vDesktops running off an EMC VNX5300

This is a very VERY cool one. You can find the Reference Architecture Read the rest of this entry »

For quite some time now we have been sizing VDI workloads by measuring what people are doing during the day on their virtual desktops. Or even worse, we use a synthetic workload generator. This approach WILL work to size the storage during the day, but what about the login storm in the morning? If this spikes the I/O load above the steady stte workload of the day, we should consider to size for the login storm…

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I have seen several Virtual Desktop projects with “bad storage performance”. Sometimes because the storage impact simply was not considered, but in some cases because the project manager decided that his Windows 7 laptop worked ok with 1GB of memory, so the Virtual desktops should have no issue using 1GB as well. Right? Or wrong? I decided to put this to the test.

Test setup

To verify the way a windows 7 linked clone (VMware View 5) would perform on disk, I resurrected some old script I had laying around on vscsiStats. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is the continuation of Under the Covers with Miss Alignment: I keep hearing this rumor more and more often: It appears that both snapshots and linked clones on vSphere 4.x and 5.0 are misaligned. Not having had the time to actually put this to the test, I thought it would at least be informative to give you some more down-and-dirty information on the subject.

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People are talking SO much about VMware View sizing these days. Everyone seems to have their own view on how much IOPS a vDesktop (virtual desktop) really uses. When you’re off by a few IOPS times a thousand desktops things can get pretty ugly. Everyone hammers on optimizing the templates, making sure the vDesktops do not swap themselves to death etc. But everyone seems to forget a very important aspect…

Where to look

People are measuring all the time. Looking, checking, seeing it fail in the field, go back to the drawing board, size things up, try again. This could happen in an environment where storage does not a 1-on-1 relation with disk drives (like when you use SSDs for caching etc). But even in straight RAID5/RAID10 configs I see it happen all the time. Read the rest of this entry »