Lowering TCO for Virtual Desktops with

VMware View and VMware Virtual SAN

Jad Chamcham, VMware

Narasimha Krishnakumar, VMware

EUC4688

#EUC4688

2

Disclaimer

This presentation may contain product features that are currently

under development

This overview of new technology represents no commitment from

VMware to deliver these features in any generally available product

Features are subject to change, and must not be included in

contracts, purchase orders, or sales agreements of any kind

Technical feasibility and market demand will affect final delivery

Pricing and packaging for any new technologies or features

discussed or presented have not been determined

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Agenda

VDI Cost Profile

VDI Storage Evolution

TCO reduction with Virtual SAN

Virtual SAN characteristics/architecture

Demo

Performance Validation

Summary

Q&A

4

VDI Cost Profile

Cost (CapEx) of a VDI VM

Data Center

Infrastructure Costs

for hosting VDI

(>50% of Total VDI costs)

*Costs calculated using a 1000 desktop Reference Architecture with a Shared Storage System

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Primary Barriers for Organizations to Adopt VDI

What is the primary barrier for your organization to adopt VDI?

Source – IDC 2011 Survey of 115 respondents

#1 Barrier – High Capex Costs

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Storage Design Choices for VDI

Storage Design

Desktop Type

Local Storage Design Centralized Storage

Design

(SAN or NAS Array)

Stateless Desktops

Only

• Server based disk

provides capacity and

IOPS

• Leverages SSD,

Server RAM or a

combination

• Choice of multiple

storage vendors,

multiple design

choices

• Performance and

storage capacity

provided by shared

storage system

Stateful & Stateless

Desktops

• Requires 3rd party

software

• Same as above

Simple Complex

Provisioning Complexity

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Storage Evolution for VDI – Shared Storage Design

Scale Up

• Highly resilient fault tolerant architecture – Built for VDI and other

workloads

• Infrastructure cost is low at full capacity

• Application Latency/Response times depends on storage

subsystem design

• Scaling beyond maximum capacity of storage system requires

another storage system – Cost is a step function

• POC to Pilot to Production takes time due to sizing issues,

complexity of managing stack

Scale Up = +1 Server, +1 Storage Array

Costs ~$$$$$$ infrastructure, $$$ per VM

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Storage Evolution for VDI – Local Storage Design

• Storage for VDI is contained within a single server

• Application Latency/Response time is a function of the SSD

tier within the Server (milliseconds)

• Allows granular scaling – Add one server with SSD & Disk to

scale out

• Deployment Simplicity – Eliminates need for extensive storage

design and sizing

• Accelerate Deployment - Customers can quickly go from POC

to Pilot to Production

Scale Up

Scale Up = +1 Server

Costs ~$$$$ infrastructure, $$ per VM

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Introducing VMware Virtual SAN

Storage Design Advantages Disadvantages

Local Storage Design • IOPS

• Low Cost

• Linear Scaling (+1

Server)

• Easy Sizing, Design

• Supports Stateless

desktops

• Server is a Single

Point of Failure

Shared Storage

Design

• Resiliency

• Supports Stateless &

Stateful desktops

• High Cost – Initial &

Scaling

• Complex design &

sizing

Introducing VMware Virtual SAN

• Aggregates storage on servers and offers

• Resiliency

• Simplicity

• Linear scaling (low cost) & support for all types of desktops

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Virtual SAN – Low Cost Storage for VMware View

…………….

vSphere

VSAN

VMware vCenter

Server • Virtual SAN clusters solid state drives and

hard disks from multiple servers to create

shared storage

• Redefines the hypervisor to cluster

compute and storage

• Policy based management for self-tuning

VM-centric storage

• Scale-out architecture with built-in SSD

caching

• Simplicity - Storage designed for virtual

machines

• Fast, resilient, dynamic

• Significantly lower TCO while delivering

same user experience

• Starts small with linear scaling of

performance, capacity, and cost

Overview

Benefits Hard

disks

SSD Hard

disks

SSD Hard

disks

SSD Hard

disks

SSD

Clustered

VSAN Datastore

VMware View

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View + Virtual SAN Configuration

Costs

• <$135* (Storage + Compute +

Networking) per desktop regardless of

scale

• Granular scaling – Add 1 server with

SSD and Hard Disk to scale

performance and capacity

Virtual SAN Aggregated

Datastore

Highly Available Scale Out DAS

Scale Up

Configuration Requirements

• 3 ESX hosts minimum

• CPU, RAM based on workload

requirements

• SSD & Hard Disk drives – Minimum 1 SSD

and 1 HDD per Server

• Pass through RAID Controller

• SSD Capacity - ~5%-10% of Hard Disk

• 10Gbe Switching backplane

*Costs include hardware infrastructure only

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View + VSAN Costs – 432 VM Reference Configuration

3 Servers

3 SSDs

200GB SSD drives (EMLC, SAS/SATA)

16 Core Intel Xeon, 128GB RAM,

8 Drive Slots

3 HDD’s

View

Infrastructure

Server

$26212

16 Core AMD Opteron, 64GB RAM,

250GB Drive

$3297

Linked Clone VM’s - 40GB Capacity

$973

$1771

Cost Per VM* $75

*Costs based on List Price

Storage cost per VM ~$6

2TB 7.2K RPM Drives

*Costs include hardware infrastructure only

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View + Virtual SAN Costs - Summary

Cost of a Virtual Desktop on Virtual SAN depends on

multiple factors

Infrastructure costs

• Server Costs = Function (CPU, Memory, Drive Slots)

• Disk Costs = Function (SSD Capacity, HDD type, HDD Capacity)

Desktop Type

• Persistent (Stateful) – Full Clone Desktops

• Non-Persist (Stateless) – Linked Clone Desktops

Resiliency/Availability

• Virtual SAN can be configured to withstand host failures

• Higher resiliency results in slightly higher costs

Lowest cost desktop on Virtual SAN = Stateless Desktop

• Storage cost range per VM - $6 to $60 (List Price)

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Virtual SAN + View = Ultra Low Cost Desktop at Any Scale

VSAN storage costs =

~50% of shared storage costs

Cost of VDI VM – Shared Storage Design Cost of VDI VM – VSAN

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View + Virtual SAN Feature Availability

Virtual SAN is now in Public Beta

• Downloadable at www.vsanbeta.com

VMware View will Integrate and deliver VSAN capabilities for VDI

• Near Term

• Tech preview availability of VSAN in a near future View Release

• View and VSAN will be available for Customers to download and try

• Medium to Long Term

• Future release of View will fully support and integrate with VSAN GA

Pricing/Packaging - TBD

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Architecture

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Virtual SAN – Architecture

vSAN cluster

ESX ESX

VM

virtual disk

vSAN object

replica-1 replica-2

Storage policy

• Each ESX host contributes SSD and

magnetic disk capacity

• Virtual SAN aggregates these resources

into 1 global Datastore per vSphere cluster

• Each VM home directory and each virtual

disk is now represented by a vSAN object

• Virtual machines run on the ESX hosts

that belong to the cluster

• HA/DRS ensures the VM is restarted if a

host crash

• Virtual SAN objects can be split into

multiple components for performance and

data protection. This is governed by the

storage policies

ESX

Witness

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Disk Group

HDD SSD

Disk Group

HDD SSD

Disk Group

HDD SSD

Disk Group

VMware Virtual SAN

Disk Group

HDD SSD

Distributed Resource Manager

Policy Engine

ESXi Cluster

Distributed Flash Caching

Virtual SAN

HDD SSD

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Virtual SAN – Policy driven management

Virtual SAN provides a policy driven framework to manage storage

• Policies are flexible and allow granular control of Storage

VSAN Storage policy template

• Simple, powerful set of rules control behavior of storage

Stripes: Number of stripes of data

Resiliency: Failures to tolerate

Storage Provisioning: Thick or Thin

Cache Reservation: Read Cache reservation

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View – Default Storage Policies

View automatically creates default storage policies based on

Pool type

• Policies maintained across operations such as Refresh/Recompose – No need

to re-associate

Full clone policies

• Failures to tolerate = 1 for persistent, 0 for non-persistent

• Provisioning: 100% reserved

Linked clone policies

• OS disk:

• Failure to tolerate = 1 for dedicated pool, 0 for floating pool

• Provisioning: thin

• Replica disk:

• Failure to tolerate = 1

• Cache reservation = 10%

• Provisioning: thin

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View – Default Storage Policies

Default View Policies

Policy values

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Virtual SAN Setup for View – Simple 3-Step Deployment

Step 1 – Configure cluster & enable Virtual SAN

Step 2 – Launch VMware View

Step 3 – Create Pool and Deploy VM’s

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Virtual SAN: Simple, Dynamic Storage for Virtual Desktops

Instantly provision

VM ‘s using View

vSphere

Hard disks SSD

VSAN

Hard disks SSD

…………….

Hard disks SSD Hard disks SSD

Clustered VSAN Datastore

Each VM maintains

its unique policy in

the clustered VSAN

datastore.

Storage capacity

and performance

scale dynamically

with your cluster.

Hard disks SSD Hard disks SSD

VSAN

vSphere

Clustered VSAN Datastore

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Demo

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Performance Results

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Hardware Setup

Setup has identical nodes

• 16 core 2.9 Ghz dell R720 machines

• 2 x Intel PCI R910 SSD 200G (1 PCI slot)

• 12 x 10k RPM Seagate SAS disks

• 10 G VSAN dedicated Network,

1G for VM network

• 2 x Disk groups per machine, 6 x disks

per disk group

• View default object policy

• hostFailuresToTolerate:1, stripeWidth:1

ESX vSAN cluster ESX ESX

VM

virtual disk

vSAN object

replica-1 replica-2

Witness

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ViewPlanner – VDI workload characterization with Virtual SAN

Workload:

• ViewPlanner 3.0 Standard benchmark with 2 sec think-time (heavy user)

• Fast 720-p HD Video

• Resolution: 1900 x 1200 resolution

• Protocol : PCoIP

• Windows 7 Desktop’s (VM’s) and Windows XP Clients.

• VDI workload is known to be CPU intensive but sensitive to I/O latency.

View Planner QoS Scoring:

• 95th percentile of all the operations in a Group have to be below the thresholds

• Group A: Interactive Operations (CPU intensive) < 1 second

• Group B: I/O Operations (Disk latency sensitive) < 6 seconds

• QoS passes when both Group A and Group B pass

• Consolidation:- Number of VDI Users supported on given Hardware with QoS passes

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Virtual SAN Delivers IOPS Required by VDI

• Virtual SAN can meet the IOPS required by VDI workload

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Virtual SAN Scale..

275

460

667

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

3 node 5 node 7 node

Nu

mb

er

of

He

avy V

DI U

se

rs

Virtual SAN scale

VSAN Linear (VSAN)

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Virtual SAN vs SAN vs All-Flash-SAN…

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

VSAN SAN all-flash-san

N

u

m

b

e

r

o

f

H

e

a

v

y

V

D

I

U

s

e

r

s

VSAN vs SAN vs All-Flash-SAN

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Group A Score Comparison

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

1.2

Avg Application

Latency

Group A

VSAN

SAN

• Impact to Group A application latencies is marginal

• Virtual SAN uses very few cycles of Host CPU.

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Group B Score Comparison

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Avg Application

Latency

Group B

VSAN

All-Flash-SAN

• Group B application latencies are close to All-Flash-SAN

• Virtual SAN can meet the IOPS required by VDI workload

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VDI workload does not require a SAN

Group B Score Comparison

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Avg Application

Latency

Group B

VSAN

All-Flash-SAN

• Group B application latencies are close to All-Flash-SAN

• Virtual SAN can meet the IOPS required by VDI workload

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Summary - Benefits of Using VSAN for VDI

VSAN simplifies storage sizing and design for VDI environments

• No need to size and manage storage as an independent entity

VMware View integrates with and simplifies using VSAN

VSAN provides both the performance and density required by VDI

VSAN lowers VDI capex costs - <$135 per desktop

infrastructure costs

VSAN enables granular scaling - Scale your deployment by adding

a single Server

VSAN accelerates VDI deployment – Customers can now start

small and scale out based on their business needs

View + VSAN = Fully integrated ultra-low cost VDI solution in

the market

37

Related Sessions

STO-5027 : VMware Virtual SAN Technical Best Practices

EUC-4764 : What’s New and Next for VMware Horizon View

EUC-5434 : Enterprise Architecture Design for VMware Horizon

View 5.2

EUC-5708: Low-Cost, High-Performance Storage for Horizon

Desktops

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Q&A

THANK YOU

Lowering TCO for Virtual Desktops with

VMware View and VMware Virtual SAN

Jad Chamcham, VMware

Narasimha Krishnakumar, VMware

EUC4688

#EUC4688

42

BACKUP

43

VMware View on Virtual SAN

VMware Virtual SAN aggregates

server attached storage

• One Datastore per cluster

• SSD is a caching tier – Read and Write

Caching

• Spinning disks used for persistent

storage

Benefits of using VMware View on

VMware Virtual SAN

• Lower TCO

• Tightly integrated distributed local

storage design for VDI

• Improved End User Experience – SSD’s

improve application performance

vSphere

Virtual SAN

Virtual SAN Aggregated

Datastore

Highly Available Scale Out DAS

SSD Caching

44

Key Takeaways

VSAN simplifies storage sizing and design for VDI environments

VMware View integrates with and simplifies using VSAN

VSAN provides both the performance and density required by VDI

VSAN lowers VDI capex costs - <$150 per desktop

View + VSAN = Fully integrated lowest cost VDI solution in

the market

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Other VMware Activities Related to This Session

HOL:

HOL-SDC-1308

Virtual Storage Solutions

HOL-MBL-1301

Horizon View from A to Z

Group Discussions:

EUC1002-GD, EUC1003-GD

Overall EUC with Scott Davis or John Dodge

EUC4688