ASSURING PERFORMANCE IN VDI DEPLOYMENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) holds great promise for end-user computing teams to centralize management and maintenance, lower operational costs, improve security, and deliver flexibility to mobile workers across a range of delivery form factors and devices. With a recent survey 1 reporting that 46% of VDI projects are being stalled due to cost and performance issues, it is imperative that engineering and operations teams have a control system in place to assure VDI performance with economical use of the infrastructure for these initiatives to be successful. With VMTurbo, teams can: Assure performance to virtual desktop instances and users through intelligent resource allocation and workload placement decisions Minimize storage IO and latency in the virtualization and storage layers, leveraging existing storage investments and ensuring VDI project success Efficiently leverage the virtual infrastructure and minimize operational costs, without costly over-provisioning or building dedicated VDI environments Carefully plan and model VDI deployments, and future-proof the VDI service through underlying support of multiple hypervisor and cloud technologies This paper explores some of the common challenges facing VDI planning, deployment and operations, and VMTurbo s unique approach for addressing them. 1http://virsto.com/news/press/virsto-survey-46-percent-of-vdi-projects-stalled-due-to-cost-and-performanc 2013 VMTurbo, Inc. All Rights Reserved. VMT-WP-VDI713.
VDI CHALLENGES Complexity VDI itself is essentially a complex distributed application consisting of a set of components including clients, desktop virtual machines, connection brokers, load balancers, directory services, image composers and more. A key goal when planning and operating a VDI environment is to ensure that end users receive performance comparable to that of a physical desktop. This requires that the underlying virtual infrastructure has resources appropriately allocated at all times, including virtual machine placement, to assure performance to the distributed VDI application and desktop end users. Propensity to Over-Provision There are a number of key performance concerns that often arise in VDI rollouts across compute, storage and network resources. These performance concerns are compounded by the extremely dynamic potential of the virtual desktops themselves. While some of the virtual desktops may be dedicated, some are likely to be shared, some could be streamed, and in many environments such as retail, non-persistent transient pools of desktops can be spun up or down as employees come and go. These concerns can often lead to extensive virtual infrastructure over-provisioning, with many teams choosing to deploy VDI on a dedicated (compute and storage) cluster, for example, to minimize contention for shared resources. However, this approach, can severely impact the return on investment (ROI) justifying a VDI project, and runs against the objectives of virtualization to maximize sharing of underlying resources. In the following sections, we explore these challenges and how VMTurbo can enable planning and successful operation of VDI deployments by ensuring performance while most efficiently utilizing virtual infrastructure resources. ENSURING VDI PERFORMANCE AND EFFICIENT USE OF COMPUTE RESOURCES With VDI deployments, effectively allocating memory and CPU resources is key to driving efficiency and ensuring performance to desktop users. While virtualization has enabled multiple levers in the infrastructure such that resource allocation and virtual machine placement can be controlled dynamically, determining what compute resources to change, and when and where to place workloads to increase efficiency and assure performance, is like solving a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. With extremely dynamic virtual and VDI environments, the jigsaw puzzle pieces are also continuously changing, adding to the challenge. This is known as the Intelligent Workload Management problem. Many vendors approach this problem with simple element-centric heuristics, such as increasing CPU and memory allocation in response 2
to local demands or moving a workload to a less loaded host. These decisions may seem sensible in isolation, but can be globally sub-optimal and harmful since they lack an understanding of the interconnected nature of the virtual infrastructure jigsaw puzzle, and can, therefore, lead to lower infrastructure efficiency, and worse, put workloads and desktop users at risk of performance issues. VMTurbo Operations Manager controls the compute and storage infrastructure in a global desired state, leveraging its analytic engine to automatically and continuously tune the environment to reduce resource contention and avoid performance issues before problems occur. The technology represents the virtualized IT environment as a marketplace of compute resources, conceptualizing the infrastructure as a service supply chain, and uses price and budget priority to match workloads demands with the supply of compute and storage capacity. THE STORAGE IO CHALLENGE Ensuring VDI performance in the face of extreme storage IO demands is perhaps the biggest challenge facing those deploying and operating VDI environments. The cumulative storage IO demands of hundreds or thousands of virtual desktops combine to produce high IO loads at the virtualization layer and on the underlying storage infrastructure. This leads to what is sometimes referred to as the IO blender effect randomized IO streams resulting from the multiplexing of multiple underlying desktop instances. Coupled with the extremely dynamic nature of virtual desktop workloads, which may be quickly spun up and down, IO demands on the virtual infrastructure can be highly volatile. IO boot storms can also be generated when multiple desktop virtual machines come online simultaneously, and significant spikes in IO can result from anti-virus scans across virtual machines. Under these circumstances, a real-time control approach is mandatory to ensure that new or departing workloads are quickly understood and factored in to real-time resource allocation and desktop workload placement decisions to maintain performance to the VDI application components and desktop users. VMTurbo treats storage IO and latency as a commodity that is bought and sold in its data center marketplace. As storage IO and latency resources are consumed, IO providers such as hosts and datastores raise the prices of these commodities. As a result, virtual machines shop around for the best prices and placement, driving the VDI application and desktop workloads to an equilibrium where VDI performance is assured while the underlying infrastructure is utilized efficiently. Effectively Leveraging Existing Storage Infrastructure Investments The aforementioned IO challenges generate significant demands on the underlying storage infrastructure beneath the virtualization layer, causing many IT organizations to 3
reexamine existing storage investments and request additional yet unnecessary investments. With the VMTurbo Operations Manager Storage Extension, VMTurbo builds upon an existing rich model of the virtual data center to understand and extend into the detailed storage domain and its interconnection with the virtualization domain, allowing administrators and IT Operations to understand the key dependencies, and more importantly, provide a basis for VMTurbo s real-time control that drives both the virtualization and storage domains in to an equilibrium that optimizes storage infrastructure efficiency while ensuring workload (storage) performance. By driving awareness of the underlying storage into VMTurbo s data center marketplace, desktop workload placement and resource allocation decisions can be further optimized, maximizing existing storage investments and VDI readiness. For example, when looking at the virtualization domain alone, it may appear desirable to storage vmotion a desktop virtual machine from one datastore to another to relieve latency/io. However, upon closer examination of the storage infrastructure, both datastores share the same underlying aggregates (RAID groups) and disks, which means that the IO contention will not be alleviated by the move. NETWORK IO While modern corporate LANs and networks have ample bandwidth capabilities, and VDI vendors have made tremendous strides with remote display protocol efficiency (e.g., Citrix with HDX, VMware with PCoIP), high-performance, graphically-intensive desktop applications, such as Computer Aided Design (CAD) and others, can generate significant network loads. Emerging technologies and business models, such as providing virtual desktops over metro or wide area networks, and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) mean that the network throughput demands of VDI must be closely monitored, managed and, most importantly, controlled. Similar to compute and storage IO resources, network IO is treated as a commodity in the VMTurbo data center marketplace. Network throughput demands of desktop virtual machines are priced according to the laws of supply and demand, guiding desktop workload placement and resource allocation decisions so that network resources are utilized efficiently while the performance of desktop virtual machines is assured. 4
VDI PLANNING Accurate planning is key to success in VDI deployments. Key questions that need to be addressed include: Can VDI be accommodated by my existing infrastructure? How many VDI images can be run on a server/cluster while still delivering a full PC-like experience? How much (and what type of) hardware should be provisioned to accommodate anticipated VDI desktops and infrastructure? What plans should be made for different desktop user types, as well as the resulting compute, storage and network IO needs? When will additional hardware be needed, based on measured VDI growth and uptake? VMTurbo Operations Manager enables engineering and IT Operations teams to obtain answers to these questions, whether a deployment is being planned from scratch, or on top of an existing virtual infrastructure. VMTurbo s unique approach unifies planning and operations, ensuring that the right amount of hardware can be procured at the right time, to maximize efficiency of the virtual infrastructure resources while assuring VDI performance to desktop users. The expected compute, storage and network demands of planned virtual desktops can be explicitly modeled. Existing virtual desktop workloads peak and average usage demands can also be profiled, allowing for accurate planning and forecasting based on actual existing usage information. 5
DESKTOP AS A SERVICE As cloud providers and enterprises broaden their service portfolios, many providers are adopting DaaS. These services offer the benefits of VDI, without enterprise customers needing to build and operate their own VDI infrastructures. VMTurbo offers a fully multi-tenant and cloud platform-aware solution (VMware vcloud Director, Citrix CloudStack). With it, cloud providers deliver DaaS services meeting service levels while efficiently using compute, storage and cloud resources and, thereby, increasing operating margins. Furthermore, providers may differentiate their DaaS offerings by exposing targeted views to their tenants, allowing subscribers to visualize and understand the health of their desktop workloads. This capability can also benefit the provider because their customers can leverage this as part of their internal incident management process associated with desktop performance problems. This can dramatically reduce the number of incident tickets logged by subscribers as they can quickly eliminate the DaaS infrastructure as a cause of performance issues before logging incidents with the DaaS provider s service desk. MULTI-VENDOR-READY AND FUTURE-PROOFING THE VDI SERVICE Today, a number of VDI solutions support multiple underlying hypervisor technologies at the virtualization layer, enabling flexibility and future-proofing of the VDI offering. As companies look to diversify their use of hypervisors, and investigate the use of hybrid clouds, a VDI management solution must be able to support these technologies, ensuring efficiency and performance of the VDI service. VMTurbo supports a broad array of hypervisors and cloud platforms, enabling peace of mind now and in the future. 6
CONCLUSION VMTurbo enables successful VDI deployment and operations by assuring compute, network and storage performance to desktop workloads and VDI infrastructure while efficiently utilizing the underlying virtual resources. This enables companies to realize the benefits of VDI while keeping performance and cost concerns under control. 7
ABOUT VMTURBO Founded in 2009, VMTurbo is a company founded on the belief that IT operations management needs to be fundamentally changed to allow IT organizations to unlock the full value of today s virtualized infrastructure and cloud services. Our charter is to transform IT operations in cloud and virtualized environments from a complex, labor intensive, and volatile process to one that is simple, automated and predictable delivering greater control in maintaining a healthy state and consistent service delivery. VMTurbo offers an innovative control system for virtualized data centers. By leveraging the dynamic resource allocation abilities of virtualization and automating decisions for resource allocation and workload placement in software, our solution ensures applications get the resources required while maximizing utilization of IT assets. Over 9,000 enterprises worldwide have selected VMTurbo, including British Telecom, Colgate, CSC and the London School of Economics. VMTurbo is headquartered in Massachusetts, with offices in New York, California, United Kingdom and Israel. www.vmturbo.com One Burlington Woods Drive, Suite 101 Burlington, MA 01803 +1 781-373-3540