R E F E R E N C E A R C H I T E C T U RE VMware View, Atlantis ILIO and Trend Micro Reference Architecture A Validated Architecture for Deploying Large-Scale VDI Below $250 per Desktop with Better Than PC Performance using Atlantis ILIO and Trend Micro
Table of Contents Table of Contents... 2 Executive Summary... 3 Introduction and Overview of the Reference Architecture Components... 4 VMware View... 5 VMware ThinApp... 5 VMware View Persona Management... 5 Atlantis ILIO... 5 Trend Micro Deep Security... 5 Design Approach... 6 Goals... 6 VMware View Reference Architecture Testing... 11 Test Results Summary... 11 Performance... 12 Application Launch Time... 13 IOMeter... 18 Storage Capacity Requirements... 21 Provisioning Time... 21 Validation Methodology... 22 Testing Configurations... 23 Conclusion... 24 Acknowledgements... 24 References... 25 Contact Information... 25 2
Executive Summary Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with VMware View 5 revolutionizes enterprise desktop computing by lowering the total cost of desktop computing, increasing security and making desktop computing more agile. However, without a well-designed and optimized VDI architecture, the cost of infrastructure required to support VDI can quickly grow and desktop performance will suffer as customers scale beyond 500 virtual desktops. The most common cause of increasing infrastructure costs and poor performance for VDI is storage. Legacy security products exacerbate this problem causing even poorer consolidation ratios. Many companies have deployed VDI only to realize that their architecture could not scale without requiring additional, massive investments in storage infrastructure that can consume 40-80% of the total cost of the virtual desktop. This reference architecture provides IT architects, consultants and partners a proven and tested architecture for enterprise VDI deployments that reduces the cost of the datacenter infrastructure required for VDI. The selection of the VDI stack was done using industry standard hardware keeping cost in mind. This reference architecture delivered a cost point of $172 for non-persistent virtual desktops and $234 for persistent virtual desktops, while at the same time delivering better performance and security than a physical PC. The details of the costing are not provided in this paper and can be provided on request. The architecture includes VMware View 5 with persona, VMware ThinApp, Atlantis ILIO and Trend Micro Deep Security. The reference architecture plan was designed together with VMware, Atlantis Computing and Trend Micro. The load generation tools and tests were also provided by VMware as well as all applications and workloads used. All testing was conducted in the Atlantis Computing labs. At a Glance Reference Architecture Components VMware View 5 with Persona VMware ThinApp Atlantis ILIO Trend Micro Deep Security VMware View Planner 2.1 Deployment Options Persistent virtual desktops with SAN/NAS Non-Persistent virtual desktops with local disk 1,000 Persistent View 5 Desktops (NAS Storage) Cost Per Desktop for Storage Total Cost Per Desktop Before Atlantis ILIO After Atlantis ILIO Impact $357 $20 94% Savings $451 $234 48% Savings Storage Capacity 17.2TB 0.46 TB 97% Less Provisioning Time 100 Hours 11 Hours Non-Persistent View 5 Desktops (Local Disk Storage) Before Atlantis ILIO After Atlantis ILIO 9x faster Impact Cost Per Desktop $276 $172 38% Savings Storage Capacity per desktops 3.2GB 0.45GB 86% Less 3
Introduction and Overview of the Reference Architecture Components This reference architecture provides IT architects, consultants and partners a proven and tested architecture for enterprise VDI deployments. The document includes a VMware View 5, Atlantis ILIO and Trend Micro Deep Security Reference Architecture for both persistent and non-persistent VDI deployments - a validated virtual desktop solution with datacenter infrastructure including servers, storage infrastructure, and networking. The goal was to design and validate a standardized building block capable of supporting 1,000 or more virtual desktops using interchangeable datacenter components that allow customers to select the server and storage vendor of choice to enhance the value of the solution. Included in this document is a description of the test environment and equipment, samples of actual test results and a detailed analysis of the cost per desktop, performance, scalability, resiliency and the time required to provision the environment. Validation for the reference architecture was performed at scale in a lab environment simulating a 1,000 concurrent user virtual desktop environment, executing a realistic desktop workload. With validated architectures, customers can have confidence that a virtual desktop environment can be efficiently implemented and that it will perform as expected. The document also includes specific information necessary for VMware customers to replicate the reference architecture in their environment. 4
VMware View VMware View is an end-to-end solution that simplifies IT management, increases security and control of end-users while decreasing costs by centrally delivering desktop services from your cloud. VMware View enables highly available, scalable, secure and reliable desktop services unmatched by physical PCs. Delivering the highest fidelity performance and user experience across locations, VMware View with PCoIP provides users with a rich, personalized desktop for access to data, applications, unified communications and 3D graphics. VMware ThinApp VMware ThinApp is an agentless application virtualization solution that streamlines application delivery while eliminating conflicts. As part of VMware View, ThinApp simplifies repetitive administrative tasks and reduces storage needs for virtual desktops by maintaining applications independently from the underlying OS. VMware View Persona Management Persona Management dynamically associates the user persona to stateless floating desktops. Administrators can easily deploy pools of lower cost stateless, floating desktops and allow users to maintain their designated settings between sessions. Atlantis ILIO Atlantis ILIO is a VDI storage and performance optimization software solution that complements VMware View to optimize storage, boost desktop performance and make VDI security economically feasible. Atlantis ILIO fundamentally changes the economics and performance characteristics of VDI by intelligently optimizing how the Windows operating system interacts with storage. The Atlantis ILIO software virtual machine is deployed on each VDI server on the same VMware vsphere hypervisor used by the virtual desktops to process storage IO traffic locally and perform inline deduplication of virtual desktop images. Atlantis ILIO runs in a dedicated virtual machine that is logically placed between the Virtual Desktop VMs and the storage for the Virtual Desktops. The Atlantis ILIO VM presents a NFS or iscsi storage interface to the Virtual Desktop VMs and connects to either local storage (SAS/SATA/SSDs) or shared storage (SAN/NAS) through NFS, iscsi or Fiber Channel. Atlantis ILIO technology including Content-Aware IO processing and Inline De-duplication is highly efficient and designed specifically for VDI workloads: Software IO Processing: Atlantis ILIO software processes all VDI traffic locally with Windows NTFS file content awareness within the same server or rack to dramatically reduce the amount of IO traffic going to storage and eliminate the huge burden normally placed on a storage array by hundreds or thousands of virtual desktops. Inline Deduplication for VDI Workloads: Atlantis ILIO performs inline de-duplication of all VDI images before they reach storage, effectively eliminating the need to store up to 99% of Windows image components, further reducing the amount of storage required for a successful VDI deployment. Trend Micro Deep Security The reference architecture also includes virtual desktop security with Trend Micro Deep Security an agentless antivirus solution that is integrated at the hypervisor level with VMware vsphere and VMware vshield Endpoint. Too often, VDI projects implement security after the fact, using legacy antivirus solutions that were designed for physical desktops to protect the VDI infrastructure, resulting in performance degradation, lower VM densities, and impacting the viability of the VDI project altogether. It is important to ensure that the VDI reference architecture includes a security solution that is built to address the operational challenges and risks unique to the environment. 5
Design Approach Designing a VDI architecture starts with establishing requirements and objectives for the VDI deployment and then making a series of design decisions to achieve those objectives using the best available software and hardware solutions. In this reference architecture, the objectives were to deliver a cost-effective, high performance, scalable, secure, and resilient VDI architecture that can be deployed quickly in order to realize the cost, security and agility benefits of desktop virtualization. In order to provide an architecture that could be used by all customers, it was necessary to design two different architectures using the same interchangeable components: a persistent architecture and a non-persistent architecture. Persistent and non-persistent VDI are two fundamentally different modesl of deploying VDI that involve different design decisions and options. Therefore, we have included information on how to on how to design persistent and non-persistent VDI architectures. Goals Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with VMware View revolutionizes enterprise desktop computing by lowering the total cost of desktop computing, increasing security and making desktop computing more agile. However, without well designed and optimized VDI architecture, the cost of infrastructure required to support VDI can quickly grow and desktop performance will suffer as you scale beyond 500 virtual desktops. The most common cause of increasing infrastructure costs and poor performance for VDI is storage. Many companies have deployed VDI only to realize that their architecture could not scale without requiring additional, massive investments in storage infrastructure. Legacy security products exacerbate this problem with resource contention issues leading to antivirus storms and low consolidation ratios. The primary goal of this reference architecture is to provide architects, customers, consultants and partners with a validated VMware View architecture that leverages the latest optimization technologies from VMware, Atlantis Computing and Trend Micro to reduce storage costs and increase desktop performance at scale. The following scenarios were tested: 1. Non-Persistent Virtual Desktop with Local Disk Storage without Atlantis ILIO 2. Non-Persistent Virtual Desktop with Local Disk Storage with Atlantis ILIO 3. Persistent Desktops with Shared Storage without Atlantis ILIO 4. Persistent Desktop with Shared Storage with Atlantis ILIO In all cases, the virtual desktops were protected by Trend Micro Deep Security agentless anti-malware. Legacy antivirus products rely on in-guest agents within the virtual desktop and make the entire VDI environment susceptible to performance dips from antivirus scan and signature update operations. This results in extremely poor and often unviable desktop VM consolidation ratios. With the new hypervisor-integrated agentless architecture offering a solution to this problem, and fast becoming the direction that the entire security industry is gravitating towards, it was decided to not include the older agent-based antivirus methodology in any of the scenarios. The primary goals of the reference architecture design were: Performance and Cost The objective was to develop a reference architecture with IO performance that is equal or better than a physical PC with a lower cost than a physical PC. 6
Scalability The objective was to develop a VDI reference architecture that scales out easily to meet growing demand for thousands of users without requiring additional storage. As part of the testing, the persistent desktop architecture with shared storage was tested with 1,000 concurrent virtual desktops. In the non-persistent architecture, the test included a single server because the storage is local disk and scales out modularly. Availability Each layer of the reference architecture is designed to offer the highest level of availability and resiliency. The reference architecture uses VMware High Availability (HA) and DRS. Security The reference architecture is designed to include critical anti-malware protection for every virtual desktop without compromising on performance or cost per desktop. Note: When security considerations are being made for VDI, there might be the temptation to treat security differently for non-persistent sessions, with the perception of risk being lower when the slate is wiped clean at periodic intervals. However, with the prevailing threat environment consisting of extremely sophisticated datastealing malware, the high risk of data breach and IP and identity theft necessitate that security be an integral part of the reference architecture irrespective of the type of VDI deployment. Time to Value The reference architecture measured the speed of provisioning VDI desktops with VMware View using both traditional cloning and Atlantis ILIO Fast Clone. Designing the Persistent and Non-Persistent VDI Architecture After establishing the goals of the VDI architecture, the next steps are to select a server to act as the virtual desktop host, select a properly sized storage system and ensure that the network has sufficient bandwidth between the host servers and the storage system. A server with 8 cores was selected to provide the optimal results from a price/performance perspective. For some customers, selecting a more powerful server with 12, 20 or even 40 cores may be the right choice depending on the relative pricing and density of the servers. The key to selecting the optimal server finding the balance between density (the number users per server) and cost of the server to achieve the lowest possible cost per desktop with the CPU, Memory and IO resources required to deliver a better than PC user experience. Storage Optimization, Selection and Sizing for Persistent desktops Selecting storage for persistent VDI architectures is a critical step in designing the architecture that will have a dramatic impact on the total cost per desktop and performance of the virtual desktops. For persistent desktops, the recommended configuration and reference architecture is to use SAN/NAS shared storage. Sizing shared storage systems for VDI involves planning for both Storage Capacity (GB) and Throughput (IOPS). You cannot rely on the specification of SAN/NAS storage for a total IOPS number when it comes to VDI storage sizing. The true IOPS number for the VDI workload will be significantly less than the published numbers of IOPS because the VDI workload is 80% write/20% read with 4K random blocks during a steady state workload, which lowers the number of IOPS that a disk will provide. For this reason, customers should use storage benchmarking tools such as Iometer to measure the number of IOPS available on the storage array with an IO profile similar to VDI. The other option is to calculate the number of IOPS based on the type and number of disks in the storage SAN 7
or NAS storage array. Caching cards for SAN or NAS arrays will only provide additional IOPS during read intensive workloads such as a boot storm but will not provide a significant improvement in IOPS during stead state after the desktops have logged in. The number of IOPS available from SAN/NAS will also be affected by the RAID level used, which can introduce a significant write IO penalty. When planning the reference architecture, it was estimated that a minimum of 15 IOPS per desktop would be required to meet the performance objective of 1.5 seconds average response time required to pass the VMware View Planner workload test. Therefore, for 1,000 virtual desktops the architecture required a minimum of 15,000 IOPS. This reference architecture was designed to use Atlantis ILIO storage optimization software to reduce the amount of IOPS to the point where 1,000 desktops could use 14 x 15K SAS Drives. IOMeter was used to determine that the storage array supported 1,807 total IOPS with a VDI workload (129 IOPS per drive). Without Atlantis ILIO, the architecture would only be able to support 120 desktop based on IOPS requirement, while with Atlantis ILIO the architecture would be able to support up to 1,200 desktops based on the IOPS requirements. Here is an example of the calculation. Example If the storage array has 1,807 IOPS available divided by 15 Peak IOPS per desktop, then the maximum number of desktops supported by that storage array is 120 desktops. If Atlantis ILIO offloads 90% of the storage throughput, then that same storage array can support 1,200 desktops or 10 times as many desktops after Atlantis ILIO (assuming sufficient network bandwidth and storage capacity). Before Atlantis ILIO 2,000 IOPS / 15 IOPS per Desktop = 120 desktops supported After Atlantis ILIO 1807 IOPS /(15 IOPS per desktop x 90% ILIO IOPS Offload = 1.5 IOPS per desktop) = 1,200 desktops supported For Storage Capacity, the calculation consists of determining the total usable capacity of the storage array and dividing it by the amount of storage capacity used per desktop. Keep in mind that the total usable capacity will change based on the capacity of disks that are used with the storage array and the RAID configuration you choose. In this reference architecture, the storage array consisted of 14 x 146GB 15K SAS drives in RAID-DP with a total usable capacity of 1TB. The thin provisioned full clones for the persistent virtual desktop image consumed 17.2GB of storage capacity per desktop 8
Example If you have 1TB of available storage capacity with a persistent desktop environment that requires 17.2GB per desktop, then your storage system can support up to 58 desktops based on capacity requirements. If Atlantis ILIO consolidates virtual desktop images by 97.3%, then that same storage system would support 2,173 desktops from a storage capacity standpoint. The following summarizes Before/After values when using Atlantis ILIO. Before Atlantis ILIO 1 TB available storage capacity / 17.2 GB per Desktop = 58 desktops supported After Atlantis ILIO 1 TB available storage capacity/ (460MB per desktop x 97.3% capacity reduction) = 2,173 desktops supported After you calculate the number of desktops supported based on storage IO throughput and capacity for your storage array before and after Atlantis ILIO, you take the lower two numbers for both before and after Atlantis ILIO scenarios. In this example, the same storage array would be able to support 58 virtual desktops before Atlantis ILIO and 1,200 desktops after Atlantis ILIO. To determine the amount of storage required to support a persistent desktop architecture of 1,000 users with a 17.2GB image, you simply multiply 17.2GB by x 1,000 users and you would need 17.2 TB of Storage as compared to 1TB or storage with Atlantis ILIO. Storage Optimization, Selection and Sizing for Non-Persistent desktop For non-persistent desktops, customers have the option to choose either a shared SAN/NAS storage system or use local SAS/SSD drives for the virtual desktop images with a small amount of storage for the VMware user persona (i.e. my documents, applications, settings). In the non-persistent reference architecture, using local 15K SAS drives with Atlantis ILIO for the virtual desktop images provided the lowest cost and best performance for a nonpersistent desktop. Sizing local storage for a non-persistent VDI deployment involves planning for both Storage Capacity (GB) and Throughput (IOPS). With non-persistent desktop using Atlantis ILIO, IOPS is the most likely the factor that will determine how many storage disks will be required in the storage array. Therefore, it is advised to start by calculating storage density based on IOPS. This calculation involves determining the IOPS available from the local storage disks and the IOPS per desktop for the virtual desktop image and workload. Then, the second step is to confirm that storage capacity available from the local storage disks will support the number of desktops on that single server. For the non-persistent reference architecture, 4 x 15K SAS drives in RAID 10 were selected. RAID 10 was selected because it provides a good balance of performance and fault tolerance but reduces storage capacity. With RAID 10, disks can fail in this configuration without impacting the virtual desktop images. With VMware Linked-clones and Atlantis ILIO optimization software, the total capacity consumed on a single host was 27GB or 450MB per desktop. When planning the reference architecture, it is estimated that a minimum of 15 IOPS per desktop would be required to meet the performance objective of 1.5 seconds average response time required to pass the VMware View Planner workload test. For the 60 virtual desktops per server, the non-persistent architecture required a minimum of 900 IOPS per server. Iometer was used to determine that the local storage disks in RAID 10 supported 235 total IOPS with a VDI workload (58.75 IOPS per drive). Therefore, without Atlantis ILIO, the architecture would only be able to support 15 desktops based on IOPS requirement, while with Atlantis ILIO the architecture 9
would be able to support up to 156 desktops based on the IOPS requirements. Here is an example of the calculation. Example If the local storage disks have 235 IOPS available divided by 15 Peak IOPS per desktop, then the maximum number of desktops supported by that local storage is 15 desktops. If Atlantis ILIO offloads 90% of the storage throughput, then that same storage array can support 156 desktops or 10 times as many desktop after Atlantis ILIO. Before Atlantis ILIO 235 IOPS / 15 IOPS per Desktop = 15 desktops supported After Atlantis ILIO 235 IOPS / (15 IOPS per desktop x 90% ILIO IOPS Offload = 1.56 IOPS per desktop) = 156 desktops supported For Storage Capacity, the calculation consists of determining your total usable capacity on the storage array and dividing it by the amount storage capacity used per desktop. Keep in mind that the total usable capacity will change based on the capacity of disks that are used with the storage array and the RAID configuration you choose. In this reference architecture, the storage array consisted of 4 x 146GB 15K SAS drives in RAID 10 with a total usable capacity of 276GB. The linked clones for the persistent virtual desktop image consumed 3.2GB of storage capacity per desktop before Atlantis ILIO and 450MB after Atlantis ILIO. Example If you have 276GB of available storage capacity with a non-persistent desktop environment that requires 3.2GB per desktop, then your storage system can support up to 86 desktops based on capacity requirements. If Atlantis ILIO consolidates linked-clone virtual desktop images by 86%, then that same local storage would support up to 613 desktops from a storage capacity standpoint. The following summarizes Before/After values when using Atlantis ILIO. Before Atlantis ILIO 276GB available storage capacity / 3.2 GB per Desktop = 86 desktops supported After Atlantis ILIO 276GB available storage capacity/ (3.2GB per desktop x 86% capacity reduction) = 613 desktops supported After you have calculated the number of desktops supported based on storage IO throughput and capacity for your storage array before and after Atlantis ILIO, you take the lower two numbers for both before and after Atlantis ILIO scenarios. In this example, the same storage array would be able to support 15 virtual desktops before Atlantis ILIO and 156 desktops after Atlantis ILIO. Networking Design For the non-persistent reference architecture, the design included Atlantis ILIO On-Each-Server deployment mode with local disk, which services all of the storage IO traffic for virtual desktop images using Atlantis ILIO and the local disk on the server. As a result, the amount of network traffic per host to the storage system is minimal. Therefore, a 1Gb network was selected from the VDI host servers running the virtual desktops into a switch. In this case, a 1Gb network connection to shared storage would be sufficient as only user persona data is stored on shared storage. 10
For the persistent reference architecture, the designed included Atlantis ILIO On-Each-Server deployment mode with shared storage. With Atlantis ILIO offloading the 90% of the IO traffic before reaching the network, it is possible to use 1Gb network connections between host servers and storage network. Without Atlantis ILIO, the architecture may require a 10Gb network connection between the host servers and the storage network. Security Architecture For this reference architecture, we used the Trend Micro Deep Security solution which provides agentless antimalware for virtual desktops. Deep Security, through its integration with VMware vshield Endpoint, uses hypervisor introspection for all security operations, thereby optimizing security functions in the VDI environment. This approach is based on offloading of all antivirus processing across all virtual desktops on a given host to a dedicated security-hardened virtual machine, the Trend Micro Deep Security Virtual Appliance. The benefit of this is massive reduction in memory footprint and CPU usage, by eliminating antivirus software from the guest virtual machines, and by centralizing those functions thereby preventing resource contention via concurrent operations. VMware View Reference Architecture Testing Test Results Summary There were a total of 6 reference architecture configurations tested (2 persistent and 4 non-persistent): # Test Configuration # of Desktops Storage Consumed View Planner Results Cost Per Desktop 1 Non-persistent with shared storage before Atlantis ILIO 300 968GB SAN (14 x 15K SAS) Failed due to IO bottleneck n/a 2 Persistent with shared storage before Atlantis ILIO 60 1050 GB SAN (14 x 15K SAS) Passed 0.5 $451 3 Persistent with Shared Storage after Atlantis ILIO 1,000 460 GB SAN (14 x 15K SAS) Passed 0.7 seconds average response time $234 4 Non-Persistent with local disk before Atlantis ILIO 60 194GB (4x Local 15K SAS RAID 10) Failed due to IO bottleneck n/a 5 Non-Persistent with local disk before Atlantis ILIO 20 64GB (4x Local 15K SAS RAID 10) Passed 0.5 seconds $276 6 Non-Persistent with local disk after Atlantis ILIO 60 27GB (4x Local 15K SAS RAID 10) Passed 0.5 seconds average response time $172 11
1. Configuration #1 This baseline configuration was only able to support 300 linked-clones from a storage capacity standpoint and failed the View Planner test during the boot-up phase before any desktop were able to start the workload because it was severely IO bound with 6 IOPS per desktop. 2. Configuration #2 This baseline configuration was only able to support 60 persistent desktops with a 17.5GB virtual desktop image based on the storage capacity consumed of 1050GB. With only 60 desktops for a 14 disk SAN (4.2 users per SAN disk), the response time was the same as the Atlantis ILIO with local SAS configuration (configuration #6) because it was not IO bound. However, the amount of SAN disks required for a 1,000 user deployment would be 17 times more than the Atlantis ILIO persistent with shared storage configuration which was able to support 71.4 desktops per SAN disk. Therefore, the cost per desktop of for storage of the architecture would increase by 17 times when compared to using Atlantis ILIO. 3. Configuration #3 This configuration with Atlantis ILIO completed 5 View Planner iterations for 1,000 desktop with an average response time of 0.7 seconds and a total cost of $234 per desktop including the servers, storage and Atlantis ILIO license cost. 4. Configuration #4 - This baseline configuration failed the View Planner test during the boot-up phase and caused the host to crash before any desktop were able to start the workload because it was severely IO bound with 4 IOPS per desktop. 5. Configuration #5 - This baseline configuration was only able to support 20 non-persistent desktops based on limited IOPS (235 total IOPS, 11.75 IOPS per desktop). The average response time was the same as the Atlantis ILIO with local SAS configuration (configuration #6) but had one third the density. 6. Configuration #6 This configuration with Atlantis ILIO completed 5 View Planner iterations for 60 desktops with an average response time of 0.5 second and a total cost of $172 per desktop including the server and Atlantis ILIO license cost. Performance Overall desktop performance was determined by using VMware View Planner to measure response times of a typical desktop workload. VMware View Planner requires an average response time of 1.5 seconds to be considered a passing test run. Both Configuration 3 and 6 with Atlantis ILIO passed the View Planner benchmark test with response times that were significantly faster than the required response time. In configuration # 2 (persistent with shared storage before Atlantis ILIO), the 1TB of storage was only able to support 60 persistent desktops with a 17.5GB virtual desktop image. With only 60 desktops for a 14 disk SAN (4.2 users per SAN disk), the response time was the same as the Atlantis ILIO with local SAS configuration (configuration #6) because it had sufficient IOPS for the View Planner workload. However, the amount of SAN disks required for a 1,000 user deployment would be 17 times more than the Atlantis ILIO persistent with shared storage configuration which was able to support 71.4 desktops per SAN disk. 12
# Test Configuration Number of Desktops VMware View Planner Response 2 Persistent with shared storage before Atlantis ILIO 60 0.5 3 Persistent with shared Storage after Atlantis ILIO 1,000 0.7 5 Non-Persistent with local disk before Atlantis ILIO 20 0.5 6 Non-Persistent with local disk after Atlantis ILIO 60 0.5 For more information on the VMware View Planner workload, see http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/servicessoftware/view_planner Application Launch Time In addition to measuring the average response time, VMware View Planner also measures response times for individual applications that are part of the workload including launch time, open, close and performing a task with the application. View Planner ran five iterations of the test to measure response times and the median response times are shown below for each application. The following charts show the applications response times for the Atlantis ILIO configurations with both local disk (blue line) and shared storage (red line). The applications in the virtual desktop image used VMware ThinApp to virtualize the applications with the exception of windows media player in the video test. The local disk configuration consistently delivers slightly faster response times because it has slightly more IOPS per desktop and the latency to the disk is lower because it is accessing disks that are on the local server rather than traversing the network to access shared SAN/NAS storage. 13
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IOMeter To measure the maximum possible performance of the storage systems for each configuration, a free load generation tool created by Intel Corporation called Iometer was configured to simulate the IO profile of VDI. Using IOMeter, you can increase the load on a given storage system until you have maximized the total IOPS available. IOMeter is not an actual desktop workload but rather represents the maximum possible IOPS with an IO profile that is similar to steady state (post logon) desktop workload. However, IOMeter is useful to determine the available peak IOPS of the storage system. The total number of IOPS after Atlantis ILIO with shared storage is high because Atlantis ILIO was deployed On- Each-Server on the same hypervisor as the virtual desktops. Each Atlantis ILIO virtual machine was able to deliver an average of 17,812 peak IOPS per server while running simultaneously using the same shared storage. As a result, the 17 hosts were able to deliver a total of 302,810 IOPS. The configuration with local disk was able to generate a peak of 20,509 IOPS per host because it had more backend IOPS available from the physical local disk (235 vs. 106 IOPS per host) in the shared storage configuration. Total IOPS Total IOPS Before Atlantis ILIO Total IOPS After Atlantis ILIO Shared Storage Local SAS Disks 1807 302,810 235 20,509 IOPS per Desktop IOPS Per Desktop Before Atlantis ILIO IOPS Per Desktop After Atlantis ILIO Shared Storage Local SAS Disks 6 302 4 341 18
Atlantis ILIO with Local Disk IOMeter Test The screen shot below shows the IOMeter test with Atlantis ILIO and Local SAS storage for a single host server that ran 60 virtual desktops. IOMeter with a Physical PC One of the objectives of the reference architecture was to deliver equal or better performance than a physical PC. To test the storage performance of a physical PC hard drive, the same Iometer test was executed on a physical PC with a 7200 RPM IDE Hard Drive. The result was that the physical desktop was able to deliver 134 IOPS. With Atlantis ILIO, both local disk and shared storage configuration provide about 2.5 times more IOPS than a physical PC. Without Atlantis ILIO, the local disk and shared storage configurations provided only 3-4% of the IOPS that are delivered by a physical PC. IOPS Per Desktop Before Atlantis ILIO IOPS Per Desktop After Atlantis ILIO IOPS Per Desktop for Physical PC Shared Storage Local SAS Disks 6 302 4 341 134 19
Boot Storm As a stress test of the reference architecture, a boot storm was performed on each configuration. Boot storms are the most IO intensive task performed by virtual desktops. As a result, when virtual desktops are IO bound as with the non-ilio configurations, they will have extremely long boot times during a boot storm. With Atlantis ILIO neither the shared storage nor the local disk configurations are IO bound. As a result, the time to boot the first desktop during a boot storm was 36 times faster with the Atlantis ILIO configuration. In the shared storage configuration, we were only able to compare a 300 desktop boot storm because the baseline configuration without ILIO could only store that many desktops on the 1TB of available storage. As a result, the 300 desktops were spread across 17 hosts (30% of the desktops per host), which resulted in faster boot storm times for the shared storage configuration for the first desktop booted. Conversely, the local storage configurations had 100% of their 60 desktops booted simultaneously, which resulted in the longer boot time for the first desktop. Persistent Desktops with Shared Storage Time to Boot First Desktop During Boot Storm (300 Desktops) Time to Boot 300 Desktops Boot Time Before Atlantis ILIO 18:48 minutes (1128 seconds) 37 minutes (2220 seconds) Boot Time After Atlantis ILIO 31 seconds 13:02 minutes (782 seconds) Non-Persistent Desktops with Local Storage Time to Boot FirstDesktop During Boot Storm (60 Desktops) Time to Boot 60 Desktops Boot Time Before Atlantis ILIO Host crashed due to storage latency of over 2000ms Host crashed due to storage latency of over 2000ms Boot Time After Atlantis ILIO 51 seconds 3:10 minutes (190 seconds) For the non-persistent baseline with local storage, the host running the desktops crashed consistently during the test due to extremely high disk latency (over 2000ms) that was a result of overloading the 4 local 15K SAS drives that only have 235 IOPS total. With only 4 IOPS per desktop, it is recommended to try booting 60 desktops simultaneously without Atlantis ILIO. 20
Storage Capacity Requirements Total Capacity Required Persistent Desktops Non- Persistent Desktops Total Storage Consumed Before Atlantis ILIO 1.05TB (60 desktops) 194GB (60 desktops) Total Storage Consumed After Atlantis ILIO 460GB (1,000 desktops) 27GB (60 desktops) Capacity Required Per Desktop Persistent Desktops Non- Persistent Desktops Storage Consumed Per Desktop Before Atlantis ILIO 17.5GB 3.2GB Storage Consumed Per Desktop After Atlantis ILIO 0.46GB 0.45GB Provisioning Time With persistent desktops, the amount of time to clone can significantly extend the time it take to deploy virtual desktops and realize the value of desktop virtualization. During the testing, the cloning time of a 17.5GB thin provisioned full clone image took on average 6 minutes. Therefore, it would take 100 hours or more than 4 days to deploy 1,000 persistent virtual desktops. Atlantis ILIO has a capability called Fast Clone that creates full clones up to 9 times faster to accelerate the deployment of persistent virtual desktops. With Atlantis ILIO, the cloning time of a 17.5GB image took on average 40 seconds per desktop. Therefore, it took 11 hours to deploy 1,000 persistent virtual desktops. # Test Configuration Average Cloning Time per Desktop Total Cloning Time for 1,000 Desktops 2 Persistent with shared storage before Atlantis ILIO 6 Minutes 100 hours 3 Persistent with Shared Storage after Atlantis ILIO Fast Clone 40 seconds 11 hours 21
Validation Methodology VMware View Planner In order to measure desktop performance, testing included the use of VMware View Planner 2.1, an industry standard VDI benchmarking tool that runs simulated real-world virtual desktop workloads and provides an average response time metric that can be used to measure the user experience for virtual environments. IOMeter Profile To measure the total number of IOPS, IOMeter with a simulated VDI workload (80% write, 20% read and 80% write with 4K random blocks) was used. 22
Testing Configurations Environment Details VMware ESXi 5 Patch 1 View Manager 5.0.0 VMware VShield Manager 5.0.0 View Planner 2.1 Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise VMware vcenter Server 5.0.0 23
VMware ThinApp The following ThinApp applications packages were provided by VMware for all virtual desktop images: Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Excel, Outlook, Word and PowerPoint Atlantis ILIO Atlantis ILIO 2.2.4 tested against both local SAS storage and shared storage. Enterprise class SAN connected to ESX as iscsi using multi-pathing Atlantis ILIO storage was presented back to hypervisor as an NFS mount. Trend Micro Deep Security Trend Micro Deep Security 8 Conclusion This reference architecture provides customers and partners with an approach to design storage with shared SAN or local drives for both persistent and non-persistent desktops. The flexibility in the design allows an organization to start with a single host and scale modularly as they grow. Atlantis ILIO, a VDI storage optimization software solution, helps customers seamlessly add it into their environment and get better than PC storage performance. Trend Micro Deep Security enables customers to deploy VDI securely without impacting consolidation ratios. Together, VMware View, Atlantis ILIO and Trend Micro Deep Security deliver a cost-effective, high performance, scalable, secure, and resilient VDI architecture that can be deployed quickly in order to realize the cost, security and agility benefits of desktop virtualization.. Acknowledgements VMware, Atlantis Computing and Trend Micro would like to acknowledge the following individuals for their contributions to this paper and the help with test plan considerations, sizing requirements, test tools and software required to build and test the reference architecture. VMware: Mac Binesh, Rory Clements, Priya Sethuraman, Rishi Bidarkar and Banit Agrawal Atlantis Computing: Joshua Petty, Seth Knox, Anjan Srinivas, Gilbert Leal Trend Micro: Harish Agastya, Arup Mitra, Brian Henger 24
References VMware View 5.0 Architecture Planning The VMware View 4.5 Floating Reference Architecture Server and Storage Sizing Guide for Windows 7 Atlantis ILIO Solutions Brief CBRE Reference Architecture and Success Story with VMware View, Atlantis ILIO and Trend Micro Windows 7 IOPS Deep Dive IOMeter Load Generation Tool Trend Micro Deep Security Agentless AV whitepaper Endpoint Security: Become Aware of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Tolly Group: Antivirus Performance in VMware ESX Virtual Environments Contact Information VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com Atlantis Computing, Inc. 2570 W. El Camino Real, #230 Mountain View, CA 94040 USA Tel +1 650.917.9471 UK Tel +44.2034052851 www.atlantiscomputing.com Trend Micro 10101 N. De Anza Blvd. Cupertino, CA 95014 USA Tel +1 408.228.5651 www.atlantiscomputing.com 25