The Virtual Storage Guy

Cisco Live Q&A – Natalie Lambert of Citrix on Desktop Virtualization Trends, Obstacles, and Opportunities

Last September Cisco and Citrix announced the first desktop virtualization Cisco Validated Design (CVD) to help customers implement standard, repeatable architectures for XenDesktop with NetApp storage. Many saw this as an indicator that desktop virtualization was (finally!) reaching a tipping point, a perception strengthened with Cisco’s November launch of its Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) vision and our joint release of FlexPod. Cisco and NetApp now offer Citrix XenDesktop on FlexPod and joint customers worldwide are deploying and benefiting from our 3-way solutions.

I finally had the opportunity to meet Citrix director of product marketing Natalie Lambert in person here at Cisco Live shortly before we jointly recorded a Cisco Live TechMinute with Cisco’s Doug Dooley. We talked about this being the first year that Citrix has a presence at Cisco Live and the impact of Cisco’s emphasis on desktop virtualization. As Natalie put it, “When Cisco talks about desktop virtualization, people really listen.”

Natalie absolutely gets the criticality of storage to a successful desktop virtualization project:

Simple Versus Complicated - Verified

One day after sharing with you my customer engagement where we discussed provisioning 'Storage for Desktops - Simple VersusComplicated' I was informed of a post from another storage vendor that verified my premise.

While my post discussed 500 desktops with VMware View and the latter covered 1,000 with Citrix XenDesktop, the information I shared relating to the storage complexities was verified by a team leader of a storage vendor.

I don't understand the need for this level of rigidity and complexity. Why would anyone want the following attributes from their storage platform?

• A requirement to provisioning physical RAID groups and map each to a function in the solution
• No sharing of capacity or IOPs between the RAID groups
• No dynamic resizing of the capacity in a RAID group if it is sized incorrectly
• SSD to compensate for the slow performance of the spinning media
• The increased financial cost of SSD drives (roughly still around 20X price premium per GB)
• The increased CPU cost to process the multiple RAID calculations of each group

I still believe the NetApp model is a much simpler & efficient model.

Storage for Desktops - Simple Versus Complicated

I’ve had some great meetings with a number of customers this week and in one of them they were very interested in understanding NetApp’s value proposition with VMware View. They were specifically interested in understanding how NetApp could deliver high levels of storage I/O from a dense, and cost-effective, storage footprint.

As a point of reference they drew what they perceived as a ‘simple’ storage layout on the whiteboard. They believed that such a storage configuration was an optimal means to deliver performance, cost savings, and operational simplicity for a View deployment of 500 users.

I was really surprised at what they drew and thought this would be a simple example to share with you how different NetApp arrays are from offerings from the traditional array vendors.

The image they drew included the layout I have recreated below.

Virtual Storage Tiering and Desktop Virtualization

Last week I presented our portfolio of desktop virtualization solutions to a group of Cisco engineers and account managers. These solutions are built on FlexPod and include desktop virtualization technologies from VMware and Citrix, include automated configuration instructions, and each is certified as a Cisco Validated Design (CVD). In short, we are working together to deliver integrated solutions intended to address the broadest set of IT and user requirements.

Today I want to share with you some of the data presented during this call that is truly amazing and clearly demonstrates why NetApp is the market leader in providing storage for virtual desktop solutions with Cisco, VMware, and Citrix.

Allow me to level set the discussion before going deeper

In terms of I/O load, desktop virtualization has two distinct operational modes that I’ll refer to as ‘Steady State’ and ‘I/O Storms’.

Cisco VXI Ups the Ante

Last week NetApp rocked the industry with our most significant product launch ever. Cisco played a key role with the release of FlexPods, a validated, pre-designed, base configuration built on Cisco UCS and Nexus and NetApp FAS storage components designed to be elastic and to scale incrementally both up and out.

This week our positions are reversed.

Cisco today announced the Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI), a vision that includes a comprehensive desktop virtualization reference architecture and solution spanning collaboration, borderless networking and data center technologies. The VXI design incorporates Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View to offer solutions that have been built and validated through extensive three-way collaboration between Citrix-Cisco-NetApp and VMware-Cisco-NetApp.

Free Book - VMware View 4.5 on NetApp Solution Guide

I’m pleased to announce that NetApp is giving away published copies of our NetApp and VMware View 4.5 Solution Guide! This offer is open to the first 1,000 eligible individuals who have a shipping address in the US or Canada. The View on NetApp book has been extremely popular and now is your chance to scoop one for free! This is the same soft-cover book currently available on Lulu.com for $15.99 plus shipping (USD).

If you are a NetApp customer or partner, run VMware on FAS, vSeries, or IBM N-Series arrays this book is the ‘how-to’ guide for implementing VMware View on NetApp. Below is the book's description from Lulu.

 

This book highlights the NetApp best practices in a VMware View 4.5 environment. It focuses on design, architecture, deployment and management of NetApp technologies that allow customers to design and implement space efficient AND high performing AND cost effective virtual desktop solutions without negative trade-offs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book runs 82 pages and the authors of book are Chris Gebhardt & Abhinav Joshi, both recognized by VMware as vExperts for 2010!

You can register for your free copy of VMware View 4.5 Solutions Guide here.

Data Storage for Virtual Desktops (VDI)

Do you know John Martin? If the name doesn't ring a bell then allow me to introduce you to John. He's worked for a number of storage vendors in his 25 year career including Legato, Veritas, StorageTek, EMC, and NetApp. His blog, Storage Without Borders, is a fantastic resource for those looking to understand the technical differences between NetApp and Traditional Legacy Storage Array architectures.

I'd like to highlight some of John's recent work, his 'Data Storage for VDI' series is top shelf. It informs the reader as to limits found with all traditional storage hardware and how NetApp engineering has implemented intelligence specific to the array which is optimized for virtual infrastructures and cloud deployments.

Trust me on this one; there's nothing more difficult than for a storage array to provide a high level of data protection, can meet the mass burst-ability requirements associated with VDI, and is cost effective. If it were easy, VDI would be common place on traditional storage arrays.

I encourage you to read John's posts. I promise you, you will understand how NetApp is making VDI a reality in many massive deployments. It'll also provide you with some insight as to how customers can leverage NetApp storage to provide virtual desktops at $25 a user per month (more on this in a future post).

We have many 5 figure deployments (in terms of seat-counts) with one soon about to surpass 6 figures (or greater than 100,000 seats).

Data Storage for VDI – Part 1 – A Personal View
Data Storage for VDI – Part 2 – Disk Latencies
Data Storage for VDI – Part 3 – Read and Write Caching
Data Storage for VDI – Part 4 – The impact of RAID on performance
Data Storage for VDI – Part 5 – RAID-DP + WAFL The ultimate write accelerator
Data Storage for VDI – Part 6 – Data ONTAP Improving Read Performance
Data Storage for VDI – Part 7 – 1000 heavy users on 18 spindles
Data Storage for VDI – Part 8 – Misalignment
Data Storage for VDI – Part 9 – Capex and SAN vs DAS

VMware Community Podcast #85 – VMware View with John Dodge

As some of you may know if I’m not talking to someone (partner, customer, etc...) I’m probably listening to my iPhone. Besides my love for music (I’m a bass player) I listen to audiobooks, courses from the teaching company, and a half-dozen or so podcasts.

Today during my flight from NC to CA (I believe we were somewhere over Kentucky) the VMware Communities Roundtable podcast #85 started playing and John Troyer’s featured guest in this episode was none other than one of my good friends, John Dodge! For those of you who’ve yet to meet John, he’s a Sr. Manager within VMware’s Desktop Specialist Consultants, and he has the following charter:

• Provide delivery capabilities to field teams.
• Develop services IP for PSO field delivery, and share with Practice Development for the purpose of releasing to the entire partner community
• Provide partner enablement, such as working with the largest SISOs on the development of DaaS Reference Architecture and GTM strategies.
• Provide thought leadership through a number of vehicles including PEX, VMworld, podcasts, and blogging.

BTW – I understand John’s team is currently expanding and will continue to do so over the next four quarters (I also understand they need additional NetApp experts).

The VMware Express and View on NetApp

PEX 2010 has wrapped up, and as usual there's way too many things going on each day which prevent me from sharing my thoughts in real time. So here's a few post show...

On Wednesday, I got a chance to take a break from the partner showcase and breakout sessions to take peak at the View Express. Let me say that impressive, is an understatement. The VMware Express is a mobile datacenter and demo environment and this year it will be traveling across the U.S. and Canada, making three coast-to-coast trips, bringing customers hands on experiences right in their own backyard.

 

Attention CEOs: Pay $75 per Virtual Desktop for Storage

Recently both NetApp and EMC published VDI whitepapers with our mutual partners VMware and Cisco. Both papers are very solid and should result in robust infrastructures; however, the solutions are far from equal and I’d like to take 5 minutes of your time to share with you some interesting points of comparison.

Sure the EMC paper focuses on UCS platform while the NetApp paper focuses on a Nexus infrastrucutre, but that’s not what I want to discuss. Yes, the EMC architecture running on Fibre Channel over Ethernet and the NetApp solution is leveraging NFS, but that’s not what I’d like you to consider either.

The level of differentiation I want to highlight is the cost per desktop in both of these solutions. Why cost? Simple, it is the number one hindrance to virtual desktop adoption.

A New Era for Virtual Desktops

We are entering into an interesting time in the industry witnessed by the release of VMware View. View Manager, View Composer, Thin App, and Offline Desktop are well positioned to accelerate the adoption of virtual desktops in datacenters and to remote access devices.

Today I’d like to share some thoughts specific to reducing storage costs with VDI or View.  A major component in VMware View Composer is Linked Clones, which provides the ability to deploy hundreds of virtual desktops from a single desktop image.  In addition to storage savings, customers will be able to update deployed desktops deployed with View Composer by patching the master desktop image.

Recently I have received a number of inquiries as to how View Composer and Linked Clones integrate with NetApp’s storage saving Dedupe and zero cost provisioning FlexClone technologies.  I’d like to take this time to discuss this topic and how VMware and NetApp are engineering the best of breed virtual desktop solutions.

I will caution you in advance, this post is a bit lengthy because we have much to share and discuss.

Need more on VDI, stay tuned…

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the conversation around VDI. Wow, for a blog which was posted at 8:00 PM EDT on a Friday evening, to attract this much attention in 24 hours, I believe that I may have struck a nerve.

At present time, it appears that my friends at EMC are a bit perplexed as to the capabilities and integration of NetApp technologies with VMware VDI. I noticed in his most recent post that Chad has begun to turn this discussion towards performance. I’m not the least bit surprised that when the conversation around functionality falters the dialog turns to speeds and feeds.

I bring this up because I don’t think we are done with the conversation around manageability and administration of VDI environments. I’d really like to share more with you right now, unfortunately I will have to defer until after we present the NetApp breakout session on VDI Thursday morning (session ID VD2387 @ 9:30 AM PDT).

Adjust your VMworld schedule if seats still remain… looks like we might need a bigger room.

The used car salesman approach

Ever feel like someone is telling you everything you want to hear while their true raison d'être is for their own gain?

Maybe I’m off base here, so I‘ll ask you to help me decide

I believe we all agree that a few of the core goals with implementing VMware are simplifying operations, and to drive down infrastructure costs.  So am I missing something with this post from Chad?

The Challenge of VDI

VDI is a great means to drive down the operational cost associated with providing and servicing an end user environment.  The challenge to VDI is that the environments are very large.  I mean moderate installations are commonly 1,500 seats and at the high end we have customers looking at 50,000 – 100,000 seats.  At this scale it is easy to understand why the storage infrastructure cost can be a large hurdle facing an organization considering the adoption of VDI.