best practices for architecting vdi with solid state storage
DESCRIPTION
Presentation to IT professionals from my days at Whiptail in Chicago before the Cisco acquisition. Amazing how the value proposition is the same, even two-plus years later, for flash and Virtual Desktops. Great perspective on how the hype may change, but the core challenges remain the same.TRANSCRIPT
SSD & VDI
How Storage Performance Determines Success
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 2
Who Am I?
Area Director at WHIPTAIL Benefit from joining very early Citrix & Symantec/VERITAS Attempt to be student Honestly tried to keep this vendor
neutral
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 3
Fifty Shades of VDI
Published Apps
Thin Client Computing
Server Based
Computing
Published Desktop
Virtual Desktop OS
Virtual Desktop Broker
User Virtualization
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 4
We’re Talking “Real VDI” Today
Hypervisor Desktop OS LAN/WAN/WWW Broker Any Device Apps Personality Data Storage
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 5
The Virtual Desktop Storage Performance Matters
Vir
us
Sca
nnin
g
Patc
hin
g
Boot
Sto
rms
Login
Sto
rms Virtual Desktop
operating systems demand high I/O along with fast read and write bandwidth from storage.
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012
How Demanding is It?
20 – 40 – 100 IOPS each
80% write, 100% random at 4k sustained
Relentless problem (does not get better with scale)
Basically the worst data pattern imaginable
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 7
2000 2005 2010 Today
Infrastructure Performance
Broadband Wireless Network Processors Bus Memory Hard Disk Drive
HDD Storage ≠ Fast DataBusinesses can't wait for slow desktops • 200 IOPS per HDD• 6-8 milliseconds latency
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 8
Real World I/O Demands
Cost of using HDDs for performance:
($ for 2 racks of HDD storage)/(1,000 users) =$300 - $500 per VDI user for storage
JUST for Operating Systems! Will it write fast enough? What else is on that array?
1,000 Users
===20-40 kWrite IOPS
200 HDDs
2 racks of HDD… + software, hardware,
maintenance, etc.
Rinse, Repeat as you scale…
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 9
Can’t Jam It All In
NetApp• Cache• 2 Storage Tiers • 20,000 IOPS• $$$$
EMC• Cache• 3 Storage Tiers• 20,000 IOPS• $$$$$
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 10
Two Types of VDI Data
User Data – Not FastOperating System - Fast
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 11
Must SeparateLowers Cost – Delivers Performance
Virtual Desktop OS Silicon Storage Array 250,000 write IOPS Performance Matters Lun ‘n’ Done
User Data Traditional Storage Capacity Matters
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012
Flash Has Issues, You Say?100X faster, no moving parts, but…
Higher cost per GB natively
All flash wears out
Not bit-addressable = slow writes
Bottlenecks at the controller
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 13
NAND Flash Cost ExplainedApples to Oranges
NAND Flash storage is the most cost effective IO performance
solution for business
HDD Short Stroking marginally improves IO performance while dramatically increasing the cost
per GB, power and cooling.
NAND FLASH substantially out performs Short Stroked HDDs at
a lower cost per GB.
Hat Tip: Enterprise Storage Array Manufacturer
HDD vs.
NAND Flash
HDDLow Capacity Utilization
vs.High Capacity Utilization
HDD Short Stroking vs.
NAND Flash
Cost per IO Cost per GB Cost Per GB
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 14
Two Types of VDI OS Deployment
Persistent
15GB – 40GB Each For Security For Developers Or Lost Battle w/Users
Non-Persistent
2GB – 6GB Each User Profile Tools App Deployment Tools Ideal Method
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 15
Silicon Storage Array withCitrix XenDesktop
Citrix Provisioning Server
WHIPTAIL Storage Array •PVS vDisk Library •Windows XP•Windows Vista•Windows 7
User Data
Citrix XenServer
VMWare Host
Hyper-V
Citrix XenDesktop
Citrix XenApp
Citrix License Server
DHCP/DNS Server
SQL Server
XenDesktop Infrastructure Virtualization Hosts Provisioning & Storage
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 16
Silicon Storage Array withVMware View
VMware Infrastructure
•Master Image•Low I/O and Capacity
•Replica Image•Read I/O
•Linked Clones•Write I/O
User Data
VMware Data
WHIPTAIL
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012
SRP
NAND SSD x
8
RaceRunnerBlockTranslation Layer:
Alignment | Linearization
What About Write Speed & Wear?RACERUNNER OS
Fabric
iSCSI
Unified Transport
NAND SSD x
8
HBA HBAHBA
2. Write request passes through the transport stack to BTL.
1. Write request from host passes over fabric through HBAs.
4. Request is written to media.
Data integrity Layer
Enhanced RAID
3. Incoming blocks are aligned to native NAND page size.
NAND SSD x
8
FC
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012
WHIPTAIL Silicon Storage Array Software Solution = Lower Cost
250k – 650k write speed, over the fabric, with protected drives, at 4k 100% random write
7.5 drive wear guarantee
Performance Scales
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 19
ACCELA
Height 2RU
Capacity 1.5TB-12TB
Silicon Storage NAND Flash - MLC
IOPS 250,000 W & 200,000 R
Bandwidth 1.9 GB/s
Latency 120 Microseconds
Power 180 Watts
Interfaces Fibre ChannelGigabit Ethernet
Infiniband
Protocols
Fibre ChanneliSCSI
Infiniband QDRNFS & CIFS
Features
RAID ProtectionProtected Write Buffer
Hot SpareAsynchronous Replication
Options vCenter Plug-In INVICTA Node Kit
Acc
ele
rate
your
Applic
ati
on
s
Revolutionize the performance of virtualized infrastructure and applications with ACCELA. The fastest write performance in it's class.
ACCELA
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 20
ACCELADesktop Virtualization
12TB 12TB
680 VMs 680 VMs 680 VMs 680 VMs 680 VMs 680 VMs 680 VMs 340 VMs5000 VMs40 IOPS Each60 UCSBlade Servers
5000 VDI Users at $50 per user2 ACCELA Arrays = $100 per userMore N+1 equals <$100 per user
Cisco UCS
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 21
Move data at the speed of life
High IOPS•Virtual Desktop (VDI)•Transaction Databases•VMWare Clusters
High Bandwidth•Video Streaming•Batch Cycles•Database Dump/Loads•Transcoding
Low Latency•High Frequency Trading•On Line Websites•Application Databases
•VMWare Clusters
Symmetric Read/Write •Database Batch Loads•Web Database Batch/Online
•Database Dump/Loads•New Applications
ACCELA
INVICTA
1.5TB-12TB
6TB-72TB
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 22
INVICTA Modular, Scalable & Tunable
Silicon Storage Router
Silicon Storage Nodes
Min/Max Capacity
6TB - 72TB
Base Models ISSA-6, ISSA-12, ISSA-24 6TB 12TB 24TB
Silicon Storage NAND Flash - MLC
Height 6RU-14RU
Silicon Storage Router
Multi-Path Architecture 250,000 - 650,000 IOPS
5GB/s - 7GB/s R/W Bandwidth*200 Microseconds Latency
Power: 440W
Interfaces4/8 Gb Fibre Channel
1/10 Gb Ethernet40 Gb Infiniband
Protocols Fibre Channel, iSCSI, SRP
Silicon Storage Nodes
Protected Write CachePower: 180W each
Features
Multi-Tenant and Multi-ProtocolCapacity Pooling
RAID Protection and Hot SparingLUN Mirroring and LUN Striping
Acc
ele
rate
your
Busi
ness
*fully configured system
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 23
Up to 650,000 IOPS
Up to 7GB/s bandwidth
Up to 72 TB of Capacity
LUN mirroring
LUN Striping
INVICTAScalability and Virtualization
Fibre Channel or Ethernet Switch
15,000 VMs 40 IOPS Each = ~$100 per user
680 VMs per Blade Chassis
120 Blade Chassis
85 VMs per Blade Server
Each Blade is Multi-Pathed
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012 24
Alternatives to SSA for VDI
Software Optimization Too cumbersome and expensive
Appliances Not scalable or enterprise
Caching Doesn’t help writes
Tiering Processor bottleneck, HDD write performance,
cost, footprint Other SSA
No one else comes close in cost, write, wear
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY WHIPTAIL 2012
1,000 XenDesktop Users
1,500 VDI Users3,000 VDI Users
2,500 VDI Users
VMware View
1,000 XenDesktop Users
XenDesktop
2,000 XenDesktop Users
XenDesktop
8,000 XenDesktop Users
XenDesktop1,000 XenDesktop Users
OVER 4 YEARS OF VDI SUCCESS