Re-imagining VDI Design:

New Strategies for Solving VDI Challenges

Daniel Beveridge, VMware

John Dodge, VMware

EUC5575

#EUC5575

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Disclaimer

This presentation may contain product features that are currently

under development.

This overview of new technology represents no commitment from

VMware to deliver these features in any generally available product.

Features are subject to change, and must not be included in

contracts, purchase orders, or sales agreements of any kind.

Technical feasibility and market demand will affect final delivery.

Pricing and packaging for any new technologies or features

discussed or presented have not been determined.

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Why Do VDI Designs of Today Require Re-imagination?

The pressing question:

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A Tale of Two User Experiences— in One Form Factor

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Video

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Which Experience Would You Prefer?

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Our Experience

, even with

unfamiliar applications

Preferred, familiar applications Better experience —poor experience

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OVER!

The days of telling users

what to do are

BOYD is Trending Upwards

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The New VDI Challenge

Users are surrounded by

high performance

devices based on flash

Users have choice of

workspace devices and applications they can use

User Experience

must be compelling and aid productivity

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Why Aren’t VDI 1.0 Designs Compelling Today?

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VDI 1.0 Design Myths

VDI is just another

VM

All VMs should use a

standard shared

storage approach

Storage for all VMs must

try to be as good as the

PC

Users experience is shaped by IO

delivery, not data storage

Standard shared

storage arrays focus on

data storage, less on

IO delivery

Flash based devices

are the new standard, not

traditional PCs

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The Big News: User Experience Is Shaping VDI 2.0 Designs

Do some user-driven events shape the overall

experience more than others?

What matters most to a user experience?

What design choices can we make to improve high

impact events?

To help answer these questions… we turn to neuroscience

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The (Neuro) Science behind VDI 2.0

Here is a short demonstration on selective attention…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

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Back to VDI 2.0

User initiated tasks draw attention to the duration

Our brains selectively filter out perception of wait times when the

delay is expected

• Example: You would hardly notice four minutes extra time on a hour commute

• But four extra minutes on a 8 second logon time would drive you insane

Events longer than 30 seconds induce multitasking

Events too short to induce multitasking but longer than a few

seconds are prime for acceleration

• And poor user experiences are weighted heavily

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Serialized I/O, Illustrated

User initiated

Background

processes

Multitask

friendly

All the user notices and

remembers

But I/O must be

processed serially

boot logon

profile

update

browser I/O

File

download

A/V

scan

App

launch

Print job

SCCM

scan

File

save

A/V

scan

Windows

paging

App

close

Windows

Eventlog

Logoff

Windows

shutdown

Event timeline

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Underlying Truth: VDI 2.0

Low I/O latency is a key

to a great user experience

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Selective Attention vs. Actual VM Resource Consumption

Users gauge experience primarily on events they initiate and must

wait upon to complete

Such key focus events often generate serialized I/O which is gated

by I/O latency

The ability to deliver short bursts of I/O to users in service of focus

events is key to user satisfaction

Focus Events are:

Not typically CPU bound

IO operations in the 500 to 11,500 range

IO is unidirectional: Either read OR write

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Impact of Accelerating Focus Events

Source: Atlantis Computing, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADvL5CoC9ho

By various latency values:

= ~3,200 IOPs

peak

3,200 IOPS x 10ms= 32 sec

Traditional Loaded SAN/NAS

3,200 IOPS x 1ms= 3.2 sec

Heavily Loaded All-Flash Array

3,200 IOPS x .1ms= 320 ms

PCIe Flash card

3,200 IOPS x .01ms= 32 ms

Flash on DIMM

It is likely we’ll hit the CPU latency boundary

launching apps before reaching this latency.

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VDI 2.0 Design Considerations

Performance

Resiliency Cost

Simplicity

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Flash is Changing the Landscape

Advances in Flash Arrays

• 1 TB MLC drives now available for $600

• All Flash arrays emerging – EMC XtremIO, Skyera Eagle, PureStorage, etc.

• PCIe Flash cards maturing – FusionIO, Virident, LSI

Hybrid Options

• Keep cost low but leverage flash to boost user experience

• VMware Virtual SAN technology preview for Horizon View 5.2

• ZFS based storage systems such as NexentaStor & Tintri use flash tiers together with HDD and

shared storage tiers

• Future designs will combine multiple flash tiers or technologies

VDI 1.0 landscape

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Breakdown in I/O Latency Control

Key Elements to I/O latency

• Average I/O latency – lower is better. Under 1ms is competitive with the best

ultrabooks / Macs

• Variance of I/O latency – lower Std. Deviation is better, producing a more

stable user experience

Key Innovation: Flash on DIMM

• Diablo Technologies TeraDIMM – 400GB Flash in memory DIMM slot

• 150K read IOPS and 65K write IOPS per DIMM. 125 / 5 microseconds Read-

Write latency

• Highly stable I/O latencies under extreme loads due to use of memory bus as

I/O transport

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View Planner – I/O Latency Matters

PCIe

Flash

Increasing

MEAN latency

with

decreasing

RAM/VM

More latency

variation and

hence less

user

experience

predictability

when system

is optimized

for RAM

0.00

5.00

10.00

15.00

20.00

25.00

30.00

35.00

1GRAM

512MRAM

256MRAM

1GRAM

Fusion

512MRAM

Fusion

256MRAM

Fusion

Total Latency plus Total Std. Dev across all A Category Applications

2xMD-STDDEV

2xMD-TotalLatency1xFusion-STDDEV1xFusion-TotalLatency

1xPCIe Flash –

Std. Dev 1xPCIe Flash

– Total

Latency

Consistent

MEAN and

STDDEV total

latency across

all types of

applications

0.00

10.00

20.00

30.00

40.00

50.00

60.00

70.00

80.00

1G RAM 512MRAM

256MRAM

1G RAMFusion

512MRAM

Fusion

256MRAM

Fusion

Total Latency plus Total Std. Dev across all B Category Applications

2xMD-STDDEV

2xMD-Total Latency

1xFusion-STDDEV

1xFusion-Total Latency

1xPCIe Flash –

Std. Dev 1xPCIe Flash

– Total

Latency

Even CPU

intensive

applications can

benefit from high

performance

swap devices

Low Avg I/O Latency AND

low latency variation helps

all kinds of applications

perform better! 0.00

20.00

40.00

60.00

80.00

100.00

120.00

1G RAM 512MRAM

256MRAM

1G RAMFusion

512MRAM

Fusion

256MRAM

Fusion

Total Latency plus Total Std. Dev across C Category Applications

2xMD-STDDEV

2xMD-Total Latency

1xFusion-STDDEV

1xFusion-Total Latency

1xPCIe Flash –

Std. Dev 1xPCIe Flash

– Total

Latency

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VMware Virtual SAN – Changing the Storage Paradigm

Traditional VDI Design

• Leverage Existing Datacenter Storage Resources

• Treat VDI in the same way as server VMs

• Promote uniformity, rather than VDI specific storage optimizations

The Software Defined Storage Re-Think

• VDI is not just another VM. It has unique traits that deserve focused optimization

• Cost per user must be driven down while preserving an attractive user experience

• Leverage advanced storage software to meet cost and user experience goals

VMware Virtual SAN—Hybrid SSD / HDD Intelligent storage for VDI

• Great option for green-field VDI designs & companies willing to question

yesteryear’s assumptions

• High performance policy driven Virtual SAN layer spanning the VDI cluster

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Performance: Virtual Storage Appliance Acceleration

Why Use VSA?

• VSA storage brings I/O delivery closer to VMs, lowering

I/O latency dramatically, improving user experience, and

minimizing ‘noisy neighbor’ contention between hosts,

and bottlenecking at the SAN

• Local disk or SAN acceleration use-cases can be valuable

VMware Flash Cache will offer similar benefits – vFC is

available in vSphere 5.5 Read after Write benefits similar to VSA

Key Use Cases

• SAN Acceleration: Extend SAN resources up to 70%, while improving I/O

latency 500%

• Local Disk: Available today for stateless designs or persistent VDI with Mirage

• Key Vendors: Nexenta’s ‘NV4V’ and Atlantis Computing’s ‘ILIO’ products

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Performance – VSA based SAN Acceleration

Provisioning: Nexenta VSA for View offloads SAN during

provisioning I/O storms

Steady State Workloads: NV4V reduces SAN load during periods

of extreme stress – 5x throughput, 3x IOPS

User Experience: NV4V improves latency levels and

responsiveness in user sessions by ~75%

Density: NV4V increased productive density levels by 72%

I/O to LUN

I/O to VSA

Provisioning SAN offload

KBps 33

66

100

133

166

200

1,255 KBps

199,881 KBps

38x

VSA Read Tput

LUN Read Tput

Steady State Throughput Amplification

MBps 2.5

5 7.4

868 KBps

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11,829 KBps

VSA WriteTput

LUN Write Tput

5,290 KBps

7383 KBps

MBps

5x

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Resiliency – How Much Do We Need? How Can It Cost Less?

Resiliency Elements

Resiliency Strategies

• Storage based Resiliency: The storage system places each block written

into multiple locations for safekeeping, ensuring protection against

hardware failures. Single RTO/RPO for all elements. Software Designed

Storage Re-think.

• Layer Resiliency: Each element’s resiliency is addressed independently

in a component appropriate manner that may involve different RTO/RPO

for each layer.

ESX Data OS Personalization Profile

VDI 2.0: Virtual SAN

VDI 2.0: Horizon Suite

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Virtual SAN: Simple, Dynamic Storage for Virtual Desktops

Instantly provision

VMs using View

vSphere

Hard disks SSD

VSAN

Hard disks SSD

…………….

Hard disks SSD Hard disks SSD

Clustered VSAN Datastore

Each VM maintains

its unique policy in

the clustered VSAN

datastore.

Storage capacity

and performance

scale dynamically

with your cluster.

Hard disks SSD Hard disks SSD

VSAN

vSphere

Clustered VSAN Datastore

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VMware Virtual SAN

Traditional storage based resiliency with a twist…

• Object based resiliency – Virtual SAN protects each

VMDK with a custom resiliency level from 0 to ‘N’ replicas

• Our minimum recommendation is 3 replicas

• Each copy of a VMDK resides fully on a Virtual SAN disk.

More replicas offer higher performance and resiliency

• Benefits of Virtual SAN based resiliency include

• Simple failover with zero RTO – great for users that need zero downtime

in a failure scenario

• Cater to different classes of users and VMs on one storage fabric

• Low cost compared to traditional SAN offerings

Future release of Virtual SAN

OS disk / Data Disk / Paging & Temp files disks can have different resiliency levels

Simplicity

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Layer Resiliency The alternate path:

Protecting your desktop with the Horizon Suite

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Layer Resiliency

Attributes of layer resiliency

• Leverage higher level abstractions to protect desktop state

• Horizon Mirage protects desktop OS contents at regular

intervals – 2 to 4 hour RPO

• Horizon Data protects user files at near real-time RPO due to

‘sync’ replication

• Higher overall RTO in event of failure. VM’s must be restored by Mirage

to another host

• Benefits: No need for storage replication – less media consumed & potentially

lowest write latency

• Ideal for low cost all-flash local disk solutions when users can tolerate higher RTO

of a few hours

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Driving Down the Cost

Storage costs for VDI 1.0 range from 40% to 60% of VDI cost

model historically

VDI 2.0 needs more IOPS than ever for a compelling

user experience

Good News – price of RAM, CPU and IOPS continue to drop

in price – new options for VDI

Major Options

• Virtual SAN: SAN functionality without the higher costs of traditional arrays

• Easy to expand as the VDI cluster grows

• Doesn’t require special storage expertise and puts the VDI admin in charge

of storage provisioning

• Leverages both SSD and HDD in an intelligent hybrid design that minimizes costs

• VSA/vFC

• Accelerating existing arrays—great user experience for a modest cost

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Driving Down the Cost…without Sacrificing Resiliency

• Layer Based persistence

• Leverage Horizon Mirage and Horizon Data to protect key desktop data elements at appropriate RPOs

• Most users can tolerate very rare outages of a few hours

• Benefits – facilitates all local flash designs for persistent users who don’t need zero downtime. Great mix of low cost and best user experience

Physical Desktops & Laptops Virtual Desktops Multi-Device Workspace

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Simplicity – Managing All of Today’s Workspace

Today’s VDI solution must interoperate

with other workspace devices

• Mobile

• Physical desktops

• SaaS

Horizon Suite – the workspace HUB

• VDI Integration

• Physical desktop with Mirage

• Mobile with Horizon Mobile

• SaaS

• ThinApp

Simplicity

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In Summary…

User perception is based on experiences they notice

and remember

VDI 2.0 focuses on improving user experience using flash

technologies, hybrid storage, and the components

of the Horizon Suite

Going forward, user experience will be a critical consideration

for VDI designs

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Other VMware Activities Related to This Session

HOL:

HOL-MBL-1301

Horizon View from A to Z

Group Discussions:

EUC1002-GD, EUC1003-GD

Overall EUC with Scott Davis or John Dodge

THANK YOU

Re-imagining VDI Design:

New Strategies for Solving VDI Challenges

Daniel Beveridge, VMware

John Dodge, VMware

EUC5575

#EUC5575