VIRTUALIZATION VIRTUALIZATION MARKET

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1 VIRTUALIZATION Copyright 2015 ixsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Lower risk and improve customer experience with TrueNAS: a uniied, robust, powerful and practical storage appliance for physical and virtual applications. VIRTUALIZATION Virtualization is a proven technology that enables multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical server. Each virtual machine is completely isolated from other virtual machines and is decoupled from the underlying host by a thin layer of software known as a hypervisor. This allows each virtual machine to run diferent operating systems and applications. MARKET Gartner (the leading industry analyst irm) states that 70% of enterprise customers have or will have virtualization solutions. These customers have transformed their physical servers to virtual servers for density, management, control or cost reasons. Many customers have virtualized their server applications and are now virtualizing Server-Based Computing (SBC) deployments of Citrix XenApp, Microsoft RDS, or are deploying virtual desktops hosted on Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, or VMware vsphere. Virtualizing these environments has tremendous beneits in terms of increasing server density, streamlining management, and lowering operational costs when compared to physical implementations. The upcoming end of support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, which afects Citrix XenApp and Microsoft RDS, as well as the growth of mobile devices, OS X, PC-BSD and Linux, adds urgency to virtualization plans. Virtualization has become the great hope of modern enterprise information technology, reducing costs by abstracting service deployment from physical hardware. However, the storage needed to sustain virtual environments has become a resource sink of its own, whether due to power-hungry spinning disks or massively complex and expensive SAN infrastructure. 1

2 For most implementations, there are some very good reasons to deploy virtualization: Hardware Abstraction: Simplify and automate the build and deployment processes Availability: Increase availability and lower costs by not having to invest in the same hardware at the disaster recovery site Consolidation: Improve agility by reallocating and re-purposing existing resources Implementing the right storage architecture is the single biggest challenge to the successful deployment of a virtualized environment. Economics and performance are just a few of the many storage-related challenges that face administrators. IMPORTANCE OF ECONOMICS AND PERFORMANCE To be successful, virtualization must please the users, the storage administrators, and the CFO. Users are looking for the same user experience they enjoy with their current physical desktops with the mobility to access their desktops and applications from any device. IT organizations want proven solutions that simplify operations, lower deployment risks, and ensure high availability and disaster recovery. The CFO wants predictable capital expenditure (CAPEX) costs that are comparable to physical PCs with tangible reductions in data center operational expenditure (OPEX) costs. With traditional server, network and storage infrastructures, VDI projects can be fraught with risk and hidden storage and network costs, and pose scalability and performance challenges. To take advantage of virtualization technology, many customers use shared SAN/NAS storage for their VDI, which can result in a poor user experience due to reduced IOPS, increased boot/logon/logof and application launch times and storage costs. Traditionally, storage accounts for 40%-60% of the total cost of a virtual desktop, which can result in a cost per desktop that is 2-4 times more than that of a physical PC. Also, users transitioning from a PC to a virtual desktop expect equal 2

3 Unlike other solutions we ve used in the past, we don t have to babysit TrueNAS in order to maintain a certain level of performance. This makes meeting our clients growing needs a much simpler process. - Marty Godsey, Director, TechSoft Systems or better performance, yet most VDI deployments don t meet that goal. Storage administrators may have concerns about virtual server performance, which could prevent certain applications from being virtualized. Performance also determines the number of virtual machines that can be consolidated within a physical server or the VDI density, impacting the overall cost of virtualization. Most users expect that their boot/logon/logof, application launch and search happen in seconds, yet these require vast amounts of storage performance. Making users wait or perform these tasks during of-peak hours will lessen the user experience. Often, to reduce the cost of VDI, critical features such as desktop and search are disabled, resulting in a poor experience compared to a physical PC. Instead of experiencing these challenges, you can use TrueNAS to deliver an economical and high-performance solution. Your employees do not need to wait; they can do what they need to do when they need to do it. SUPPORT ALL YOUR USERS Your users are not one size its all. They vary from the casual user to the power user and they may use mobile devices or work from their desk. Most access corporate applications through Windows; however many use Mac OS X, BSD, or Linux. With TrueNAS you can deliver uniied storage that will provide all users with a high performance user experience regardless of the type of desktop stateless, persistent or cloned. REDUCE STORAGE COST Gartner s research says that the largest challenge associated with virtualization is storage cost. To get the performance required, many sites over provision storage capacity in order to achieve performance. With all lash arrays, storage costs can be further elevated due to the limited capacity and high cost per gigabyte. 3

4 Server, Network,Rack, etc... 9% VDI Infrastructure 9% OS License 4% Storage 58% Client 20% According to Gartner: storage is the No. 1 challenge most IT organizations face when considering virtual desktop projects. Many organizations reduce costs by reducing the storage used. However this also reduces the performance of the system. Sizing at lower than PC performance means that end users will have a degraded virtual experience compared to the physical experience they are used to. This creates user experience problems such as slow boot/logon/logof times, sluggish application launches, and unresponsive search options. When comparing costs, user experience must always factor into your comparison. 4

5 AVOID DOWNSIDES Maintenance of 1,000s of virtual desktops can impact the productivity of your staf. With the massive number of IOPS at its disposal, the TrueNAS Z50 TrueFlash array solves this issue. Boot/Logons/Logofs are much faster than traditional SAN/NAS. Also, required maintenance such as recomposing VMs and virus scanning does not impact end user experience. UNIFIED ACCESS TrueNAS supports multiple protocols AFP, CIFS/SMB, iscsi and NFS. Each virtual machine can be provisioned using any of these protocols, either block storage with iscsi or ile protocols such as AFP, SMB and NFS. You can also provision ile shares for these VMs using AFP, CIFS/ SMB and NFS, all on a single TrueNAS appliance. Instead of creating storage silos, you can run multiple applications on a single TrueNAS appliance. BENEFITS TO USING NFS Network File System (NFS) is a distributed ile system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in Speciically, it exports disk devices over an Ethernet network that NFS clients can access. Random writes by the VM are converted to sequential writes by the hypervisor. This allows writes to take advantage of the write cache in TrueNAS. Locking is provided at the hypervisor layer and will be communicated to another server when a VM is moved by the hypervisor (such as with VMware HA or VMware DRS). TrueNAS supports NFSv2, NFSv3, and NFSv4 (NFSv4 is a 9.3 feature). VMware ESXi will use NFSv3. Microsoft supports network-attached storage for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 when using SMB 3.0. NFS-based storage is not supported

6 BENEFITS TO USING ISCSI iscsi is a protocol standard for the consolidation of storage data. iscsi allows TrueNAS to act like a storage area network (SAN) over an existing Ethernet network. Speciically, it exports disk devices over an Ethernet network that iscsi clients (called initiators) can attach to and mount. To access remote targets, your host uses iscsi initiators. Initiators transport SCSI requests and responses between the server and the target storage device on the IP network. Fail over and load balancing coniguration is crucial when deploying a virtual storage solution in your IT environment to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. Every TrueNAS has at least 2 network interfaces allowing you to support a multi-path I/O enabled iscsi Target coniguration, which is one of a vendor s best practices when deploying a virtualization environment. BENEFITS TO USING ISCSI FOR VMWARE TrueNAS uses thin provisioning. A VMFS datastore that you deploy on TrueNAS reports its logical size. For example, if TrueNAS reports 2TB of storage while in reality TrueNAS consumes only 1TB, the datastore considers 2TB to be the size. As the datastore grows, it cannot determine whether the actual amount of physical space is still suicient for its needs. When using iscsi, TrueNAS will use VAAI, which allows you to perform these tasks: vcenter will indicate if a datastore allocated on one or more TrueNAS volumes uses thin provisioning. TrueNAS will report the physical space used so that it s visible on vcenter. As your datastore grows, ESXi will pass this information to TrueNAS where the GUI will warn you about breaches in physical space and about out-of-space conditions. 6

7 Copyright 2015 ixsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. If a volume runs out of space then TrueNAS will tell ESXi to pause any running VMs. This allows their space issues to be addressed, instead of encountering a write error. When using eagar thick zeroed provisioning for virtual machines, TrueNAS will write the zeros instead of having ESXi write the zeros. When a datastore ile is copied (such as when a VM is provisioned from a template) a TrueNAS clone (which occurs nearly instantaneously and takes very little space) will be used instead of copying the ile over the network. ESXi will inform TrueNAS about the datastore space that is freed when iles are deleted or removed from the datastore (such as when the VM is deleted or Storage vmotion is used). TrueNAS can then reclaim the freed blocks of space. BENEFITS TO USING iscsi FOR HYPER-V TrueNAS supports Microsoft Oloaded Data Transfer (ODX), which is a feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2012 that speeds up copy and move operations. When a ile is copied (such as when a VM is provisioned from a template) a TrueNAS clone (which occurs nearly instantaneously and takes very little space) will be used instead of copying the ile over the network. Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) base will indicate if a TrueNAS LUN uses thin provisioning. When a VM is moved to another ile on the same TrueNAS array, Windows Server 2012 will issue a T10 SCSI command, UNMAP. TrueNAS will mark the space that was formerly in-use by the VM as free. STORAGE OPTIMIZATION TrueNAS uses multiple compression and deduplication techniques and technologies to reduce the volume of data actually stored. It reduces your storage capacity needs for VMs by 5-15 times, reducing the size of IOs, which actually increases performance and conserves space for additional data and keeps data growth under control. 7

8 The recommended TrueNAS compression algorithm takes advantage of modern multi-core CPUs and achieves a very good compression ratio without impacting disk performance. In addition to fast compression, it also provides fast decompression of data. Compression has virtually no disk access impacts, and will only compress data that will net at least a 12.5% savings. Slower compression algorithms that conserve even more space are also available for high-density archival storage. Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data in order to save space. When TrueNAS deduplication is enabled, data is scanned and analyzed for potential duplicates before being stored. ixsystems should always be consulted before enabling deduplication so that we can analyze the beneit to your environment. PROTECT AND RECOVER YOUR DATA Downtime is not an option. Data growth and retention requirements keep you under a microscope. You need to deal with rapidly expanding data, while simultaneously reducing storage costs. Data is an essential part of your organization. But before it can become an asset, it must be eiciently protected and archived. Simply adding high-performing storage is very expensive and highly ineicient. This and the world s most successful open source software deined storage product, FreeNAS, guided our design of TrueNAS. TrueNAS provides a scalable platform, based on the Zettabyte File System (ZFS), which keeps up with even the largest data deployments, supporting up to 256 zettabytes in a single storage pool. Every TrueNAS model supports storage controller redundancy, hot spares, redundant power and cooling, non-disruptive irmware updates and upgrades, and around the clock service. The modular TrueNAS hardware platform allows TrueNAS to grow with your needs. Upgrade performance or capacity by simply swapping controllers or adding lash or disk. TrueNAS includes instant snapshots and clones. Integration with VMware enables consistent snapshots to be protected and retained locally or remotely. A REST API enables you to script and automate protection. 8

9 TrueNAS exceeded our performance needs. With ZFS replication and snapshots, I know I can easily bring back a Virtual Machine if something goes wrong and that makes me sleep well at night. - Steve Davidson, Systems Administrator, Ashland Food Co-Op TrueNAS provides unlimited, instant previous ile version retention and restoration without intervention by administrators. Data is automatically protected locally against unintentional alteration with minimal storage consumption and replicated remotely to another TrueNAS storage array. TrueNAS does not require that you dedicate a portion of your usable space for snapshot or clone data. The entire pool is used as a space for snapshots and clones. Operations occur instantaneously and the initial snapshot or clone uses no space. It is only when that data changes that space is used for the original or changed data. This makes snapshots and clones very cheap in terms of space. When deploying VMs ensure that new VMs are deployed using clones. When combined with storage optimization, TrueNAS ensures that VMs occupy minimal space, increasing IOPS and reducing latency. CUT COSTS The true cost of storage isn t isolated to the initial purchase, but is a combination of the CAPEX and OPEX costs. Gartner states that yearly OPEX averages 40%-60% of CAPEX. These costs include power, cooling, network, rack space, drive failures, and maintenance licensing. Over the normal 3-5 year life cycle of a virtualization project, the storage OPEX will be more than double the CAPEX. Upper management most often prefers CAPEX to OPEX because they can take advantage of amortization and depreciation of an investment over an extended period of time. Using TrueNAS reduces the amount of storage that must be maintained and operated by over 90%, signiicantly reducing OPEX cost and keeping upper management happy. SUPPORTS ALL VIRTUALIZATION ENVIRONMENTS By earning the Citrix Ready and VMware Ready certiications, TrueNAS has proven its ability to meet stringent Citrix and VMware standards. TrueNAS has successfully passed a series of tests established by Citrix 9

10 and VMware ensuring that it works efectively with XenServer and vsphere, allowing customers to deploy TrueNAS in production with conidence. For customers that use other hypervisors, TrueNAS also supports Microsoft Hyper-V, Linux KVM, and Oracle VirtualBox. RECOMMENDATIONS ixsystems recommends that storage used for virtual machines be presented as iscsi. This allows VAAI to be used for VMware and ODX for Hyper-V. This also oloads the virtual machine recompose activity to the host running the hypervisor. BENEFITS OF USING TRUENAS FOR VIRTUALIZATION Most users are concerned with performance and security. That s why the TrueNAS appliance provides virtual desktops that are as fast as a physical PC with high availability and business continuity built-in. If a primary site fails or is compromised by a natural disaster or other unplanned event, employees can still access all of the resources they require to do their jobs. The TrueNAS data can be replicated between servers or between sites using hypervisor high-availability and disaster recovery functionality in combination with TrueNAS. In the event of an outage, companies can avoid disrupting critical business processes. As the size and scale of your VM deployment increases, you will need a storage system that can keep up with the performance demands of your virtual desktops, without compromising end-user experience. The thin provisioning of TrueNAS enables you to allocate space (provision) your VMs faster than legacy storage. TrueNAS provides an instant snapshot and clone capability, enabling you to clone your VMs near instantaneously. The performance of TrueNAS ensures that boot/login/ logofs and application launches happen much quicker, while the use of ZFS enables you to recompose 1000s of VMs or perform virus scanning without impacting user experience. Using TrueNAS you can keep your users, storage administrators, and the CIO happy. 10

11 TrueNAS delivers the performance required to run such applications as SQL Server, Oracle, Windows, PC-BSD, VMware Horizon View, Citrix XenDesktop, LibreOice, Chrome, ile and print sharing and other business applications. Learn more by visiting 11