MANAGE YOUR VDI STORAGE COSTS VDI PERFORMANCE 2 Avoid VDI Performance Issues with Monitoring, Testing and Tools

Handbook VIRTUALIZATION CLOUD DEVELOPMENT APPLICATION IT HEALTH NETWORKING ARCHITECTURE STORAGE CENTER MANAGEMENT DATA BI/APPLICATIONS RECOVERY/COMPLIANCE DISASTER SECURITY 1 EDITOR’S NOTE Manage Your VDI 2 Storage Costs VDI PERFORMANCE Storage doesn’t have to be the stumbling block to your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) project. Careful planning and the 3 VIRTUAL DESKTOP right tools can keep storage performance up and its price down; CONFIGURATION learn how to size your VDI implementation. 4 REDUCING VDI COSTS EDITOR’S NOTE 1 VDI Project Action Steps: Evaluate, Test and Prepare It seems like everywhere you look—or at Beyond that initial cost assessment, there Home least everywhere you work—you can find some- are several crucial things to consider. IT pros one talking about the advantages of virtual undertaking VDI projects must set clear project Editor’s Note desktop infrastructure (VDI) projects. The ben- goals, evaluate and investigate licensing mod- efits of VDI over traditional PC implementa- els, know network requirements and, perhaps VDI Performance tions are well known in the IT community. For most importantly, have a clear understanding storage managers, simpler provisioning and im- of user activity on desktops. There are common Virtual Desktop Configuration proved security are often at the top of the list. VDI project pitfalls that can be avoided, and a But experienced storage pros also know the set of best practices (and free tools) that can Reducing potential downsides: cost and performance. help guide a VDI implementation so it delivers VDI Costs The most compelling reason for VDI isn’t likely all the potential benefits. to be strict ROI. Instead, the reason for VDI If you’ve decided on a VDI project for your implementations can be found in a changing, shop, this handbook can help you chart a mobile workforce, often working on their own course with practical advice from experts who devices, and needing to secure and manage have completed successful VDI projects and data. Indeed, it’s the cost of VDI projects that seen first-hand how the technology delivers on can be intimidating at the outset. In the quest its promise. n to keep customers—end users—happy, storage pros conducting VDI implementations have to Ellen O’Brien decide how much to invest in solid-state drives Executive Editor or how much spinning disk to use. SearchVirtualStorage.com 2 MANAGE YOUR VDI STORAGE COSTS VDI PERFORMANCE 2 Avoid VDI Performance Issues With Monitoring, Testing and Tools There are many third-party software tools like those from SwiftTest, to accurately simu- Home and products that enable data center managers late how well the underlying VDI storage in- to plan effective virtual desktop infrastructure frastructure will perform based on a variety Editor’s Note (VDI) deployments. From freeware monitoring of real-world testing scenarios. The insights to internal testing methods, a range of preven- gained from utilizing benchmark performance VDI Performance tive measures can help organizations avoid VDI tools will enable you to identify up front which performance issues and end-user discomfort, components will be needed to support data Virtual Desktop Configuration as well as free up storage and staff resources. movement on the network infrastructure side as well as in back-end data stores. Reducing What’s more, products like Login VSI and VDI Costs VDI PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION SwiftTest can be used post-deployment to Ideally, a virtual desktop infrastructure should help you gain visibility into any potential per- be thoroughly tested and benchmarked prior formance bottlenecks that may creep into the to going live. Basic freeware tools like ioMeter environment as you plan for changes to the in- can be used to do some initial measurements; frastructure, such as adding more virtual desk- however, to get a more in-depth picture of how tops to another network segment. the VDI environment will perform under pro- There are also VDI assessment tools, such duction loads, more advanced tools like Login as those from Liquidware Labs. That offering VSI can be used to simulate close to real-world relies on software to perform an assessment of end-user desktop activity. the environment, and then suggests which us- Likewise, you can leverage testing appliances, ers will be most suitable to having the desktop 3 MANAGE YOUR VDI STORAGE COSTS VDI PERFORMANCE 2 experience virtualized and which ones will Xangati may provide a more comprehensive not. These products are unique because they suite of VDI performance monitoring technol- calculate the workload required by the current ogy. Some universal VDI performance issues, desktop environment, rather than the potential like boot storms, aren’t nearly as prevalent in environment. a virtual server infrastructure. The aforemen- tioned companies offer products that provide Home in-depth analysis and monitoring of infra- DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS structure-related conditions unique to VDI Editor’s Note From a day-to-day management perspective, environments. some industry experts suggest monitoring Xangati provides a VDI performance moni- VDI Performance storage IOPS as a way to judge system loads. toring framework with DVR rollback capabili- This is fine for establishing a general base- ties to review both historical and real-time I/O Virtual Desktop Configuration line of VDI performance during peak load activity. This is particularly useful for isolating conditions; however, it’s not an ideal tool for storage performance issues and determining Reducing troubleshooting problems in real time. The the root causes of activities that cause con- VDI Costs challenge here is that unless you happen to tention storms. Likewise, eG Innovations has observe a system bottleneck when it occurs in management tools that take historical data real time, it will be very difficult to determine from the VDI infrastructure and establish a whether the performance issue is storage or baseline for what constitutes normal per- network related; and even then, it will be diffi- formance activity. When baseline activity is cult to ascertain the root cause. breached, VDI administrators are notified. While there are many companies that offer For example, in a large university campus virtual server monitoring solutions, it’s impor- setting, VDI administrators could plan for peak tant to distinguish VDI from virtual machine demand activity at the end of a semester as (VM) monitoring. For these reasons, com- students use their virtual desktops for exam panies like eG Innovations, SolarWinds and preparation, term paper submissions and so on. 4 MANAGE YOUR VDI STORAGE COSTS VDI PERFORMANCE 2 On the other hand, a rush of students access- VDI workloads are read I/O-oriented. To cir- ing a recorded lecture the day before an exam cumvent this limitation, companies like Alac- may be less predictable. Having an automated ritech and Avere Systems have developed NAS system to track historical activity can at least caching appliances to “front end” existing NAS provide VDI administrators with some insight storage systems. as to how to proactively plan and react to such Home events. As a NAS storage back end Editor’s Note approaches 40% utilization or MANAGING VDI STORAGE TIERING higher, read I/O begins to suffer VDI Performance AND CAPACITY USAGE as write I/O workloads are queued Many organizations are leveraging networked- Virtual Desktop ahead of read I/O activity. Configuration attached storage (NAS) devices to serve up VDI storage resources. Oftentimes, these are exist- Reducing ing storage assets that are being re-purposed. By providing an intelligent front-end cach- VDI Costs NAS devices work very well for servicing VDI ing appliance, read I/O workloads can be auto- workloads provided their storage capacity matically loaded into flash or solid-state drive and performance is carefully monitored and storage to provide highly optimized read I/O managed. performance. This has the dual benefit of ex- The inherent challenge is that many NAS tending the life of the existing NAS array, as systems are specifically optimized for write I/O it can be dedicated to serving up write I/O ac- performance. As a NAS storage back end ap- tivity—which it was designed for—while also proaches 40% utilization or higher, read I/O acting as a relatively low-cost storage reposi- begins to suffer as write I/O workloads are tory for inactive data sets. queued ahead of read I/O activity. This spells Once VDI storage capacity has been provi- trouble for VDI deployments as the majority of sioned to optimize both read and write I/O 5 MANAGE YOUR VDI STORAGE COSTS VDI PERFORMANCE 2 activity, the question of the best way to moni- want to sidestep from the outset as backing tor ongoing storage capacity can be addressed. up a VDI environment may impact network The onboard storage management tools from bandwidth and result in the consumption of the NAS caching device and the back-end NAS SAN storage resources. Virtual desktops con- array, for example, can be used to determine sist of either static desktop images, with some growth rates for capacity planning purposes. minor user customized settings such as those Home Leveraging a VDI monitoring framework to au- deployed for shift workers in a customer call tomate the collection of this data is particularly center, or remote desktops that are frequently Editor’s Note useful, especially for VDI deployments in ex- disconnected from the corporate network for cess of 1,000 desktops. knowledge-based workers such as sales reps VDI Performance Overall storage growth is rarely, if ever, pro- working in their respective territories. portional across the various users consum- In either case, automating the backup pro- Virtual Desktop Configuration ing VDI storage resources. For this reason, it’s cess so end users aren’t charged with protect- helpful to gain better insight by isolating the ing their own data is the most consistent and Reducing biggest consumers of VDI storage resources.

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