VDI Solutions Guide INTRODUCTION

Transcription

1 1 INTRODUCTION

2 Introduction 2 INTRODUCTION 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.

3 The Top Ten Storage Challenges for VDI Deployment 3 THE TOP SEVEN STORAGE CHALLENGES FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT 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. 1 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. 2 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.

4 4 THE TOP SEVEN STORAGE CHALLENGES FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT 3 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. 4 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. 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

5 5 THE TOP SEVEN STORAGE CHALLENGES FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT 5 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. 6 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. 7 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. 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.

6 Yavapai Case Study 6 Yavapai College Case Study 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 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 costeffectively 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.

7 7 Yavapai College Case Study 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 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.

8 Tintri for VDI Deployment 8 Tintri for VDI Deployments TECHINICAL WHITE PAPER by Saradhi Sreegiriraju Director, Product Management

9 9 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

10 10 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.

11 11 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.

12 12 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

13 13 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. Purposebuilt 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 highperformance 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.

14 14 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.

15 15 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.

16 16 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.

17 17 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.

18 18 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 randomwrite 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.

19 19 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.

20 20 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.