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©2012 Tintri, Inc. All rights reserved. w w w . t i n t r i . c o m

VDI Solutions GuideINTRODUCTION

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VDI Solutions GuideINTRODUCTION

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INTRODUCTION

The promise of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is not new. For several years, storage and virtualization companies have been

trumpeting the benefits of VDI as a salve for everything from centralized data management and increased user-level security to

rapid workstation provisioning and increased productivity in the lab.

However, if you are like many organizations that have attempted to deploy VDI using existing storage architectures, you are

likely feeling the pain of complexity, inefficiency, and latency, all combining to either stall or seriously hinder your VDI initiative.

Whether it is the complexity of defining IO-level VM needs before you’ve deployed a single desktop instance, the sluggish boot

times and usage hiccups across your user base, or the rising costs of having to buy more and more disk to support your storage

needs, there’s a good chance the expected benefits of VDI are considerably less than anticipated. But the root of these problems

is not VDI itself; rather, it is the inadequate storage architectures being used to support it.

When deployed on top of a storage solution that is fully aware of the VMs running on it, VDI not only becomes manageable; it

becomes robust, scalable, and powerful. The key to success in deploying VDI lies in the intelligence of the storage and file system

supporting it. Therefore, choosing the right solution and understanding what questions to ask when researching VDI are critical

for any savvy organization.

In this VDI Solution Guide, Tintri will give you unique perspectives on VDI from the vendor and customer viewpoint, as well as

questions to ask and points to consider when deploying VDI in your organization.

• Our VDI Whitepaper will give you an in-depth look at the technical requirements of a proper VDI deployment, with a

discussion of product features and functionality to keep top-of-mind.

• Our VDI Case Study will discuss how one organization solved their VDI challenges using a completely new approach to

storage, saving time, money, and needless cycles.

• Our Top 7 Challenges for VDI Deployments is a quick reference guide to consult when doing an initial review of

storage architectures that promise to support and accelerate VDI.

The benefits of a VDI solution architecture that handles the real-world storage needs of today’s quickly scaling organizations are

clear and achievable. To unlock the real potential of VDI inside your organization, be sure to address these important points.

Introduction

VDI Solutions GuideTHE TOP SEVEN STORAGE CHALLENGES

FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT


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THE TOP SEVEN STORAGE CHALLENGES FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT

AND HOW TO ELIMINATE THEM WITH TINTRI VMSTORE

Deploying virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) using traditional storage arrays presents challenges for storage and VM admins.

What’s worse, these issues can have significant long-term ramifications for cost and functionality (not to mention job security).

Tintri VMstore eliminates these barriers and provides simple, fast and efficient storage, purpose-built for VDI.

Let’s take a look at the top seven challenges in today’s VDI environments and how they can be overcome with Tintri VMstore.

Buying more storage than you need: Storage is at the heart of VDI. Cost per desktop is often cited as a barrier to

VDI adoption. The two major factors for cost overruns with legacy storage-based VDI are:

a. Capital costs: To guarantee VDI performance, many companies overprovision storage with hundreds of disks,

installing far more capacity than they need. As demand increases, this quickly becomes cost-prohibitive.

b. Operational costs: Overprovisioning creates a larger storage footprint, increasing management, space, power,

and cooling expenses.

Tintri solution: One 3U Tintri VMstore appliance has the capacity and performance to support up to 1,000 VMs, dramatically

reducing capital and operational costs, and the need for rack space, power and cooling. High VM density fundamentally

changes the economics of storage.

Desktop performance and user experience: Storage IO performance — low latency and consistent

performance — is critical to VDI. Legacy storage systems fail because:

a. A good end user experience and adequate performance in the face of boot storms, antivirus storms, image

refreshing and recomposing requires overprovisioning.

b. VDI produces small, random write-intensive IO (typically a 20/80 read/write mix) in steady state and bursts

of IO during peak workloads for short periods. Storage arrays with flash as read-cache can’t deliver

consistent performance.

Tintri solution: Tintri VMstore appliances leverage flash as first-class storage for writes and reads, rather than as bolt-on read

cache. Tintri’s intelligent working-set analysis services 99 percent of read and write IO from flash at sub millisecond latency,

providing consistent performance to meet peak and unanticipated IO workloads.

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The Top Ten Storage Challenges for VDI Deployment


FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT


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Deployment and management is hard: Operational simplicity is key to managing and scaling storage for VDI.

Traditional SAN and NAS arrays require:

a. Complex management as more desktops come online. Admins must continually manage RAID groups, LUNs,

volumes and multiple tiers of storage, making large VDI environments almost impossible to manage.

b. Painstaking, manual monitoring and troubleshooting. General-purpose arrays lack visibility into VM

performance, making monitoring and troubleshooting time-consuming.

Tintri solution: Tintri VMstore can be set up and configured in minutes. Tintri’s VM-aware storage manages at the VM and

vDisk level; there are no LUNs, volumes or other storage objects to manage. Tintri VMstore provides per-VM and per-vDisk

performance and capacity metrics for granular monitoring and simple troubleshooting.

Complex storage architectures won’t scale: Most projects start out with small VDI installations and grow

incrementally, so simple storage scalability is a must. Traditional storage arrays face two scalability challenges:

a. Architecture designs can’t be scaled easily. Deployment architecture designed for a 500 seat VDI pilot using

legacy modular storage systems won’t work for a 5,000 seat production environment.

b. Maintenance and management is complex and makes scaling VDI cumbersome.

Tintri solution: With Tintri, VDI storage scales easily to support thousands of users by adding VMstore appliances just as

compute resources are scaled by adding ESX hosts.

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“From the pilot we conducted with VMware View running on vSphere, we realized that our existing storage would

not cost-effectively scale to support our VDI deployment” said William Earles. “Installation of the Tintri T540 appliance

was very simple and within the hour we had deployed VMware View linked-clone desktop VMs,” said Earles. “Most

importantly, we are able to deploy virtual desktops at less than half the cost of physical desktops, which is

crucial given our budget constraints,” said Earles.

– William Earles

Director of Infrastructure Services, Yavapai College


FOR VDI DEPLOYMENT


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Architecting VDI solutions is complex: With legacy storage systems, architecting, provisioning and maintaining

end-to-end solutions for large VDI environments requires many hours of administration.

a. Best practices for VDI storage architectures using a traditional SAN or NAS means multiple datastores for

storing base and replica images, OS disk, persistent disk and disposable disk on different storage tiers. This

complexity makes the process error-prone.

b. Provisioning and maintenance, such as creating clone VMs, require careful orchestration to ensure storage

resources are not overrun.

Tintri solution: With Tintri, storage architecture is simple. Each VMstore appliance appears as one datastore with intelligent

automatic data placement, eliminating the need for multiple datastores.

Highly inefficient snapshots for data protection: A major consideration in VDI is data protection. This makes

storage vital in large-scale VDI with thousands of VMs. Storage architectures designed for physical workloads with

volume-level snapshots suffer from:

a. Inefficient storage utilization as hundreds of VMs in a volume are snapshotted when only a few actually need to be.

b. Cumbersome recovery procedures for a single VM.

Tintri solution: Tintri VMstore appliances provide automated data protection using per-VM space-efficient snapshots with no

performance impact.

VM consolidation and the best ROI: Storage consolidation for various use cases — VDI, infrastructure VMs,

databases etc. — reduces costs and increases ROI. Legacy storage systems lack per-VM control and suffer from “noisy

neighbor” problems that call for overprovisioning and separate storage systems for different workloads, preventing

greater consolidation.

Tintri solution: Tintri’s VM-aware storage provides performance isolation and QoS on per-virtual disk and per-VM basis to

prevent spikes from a handful of VMs from causing disruptions. This VM-aware intelligence helps increase consolidation,

providing the best ROI possible.

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“We were blown away by how many IOPS were needed for our VDI deployment,” said Ryan Makamson. “Existing

storage systems became the bottleneck,” Makamson said. “Since implementing T540 for VDI, we don’t have

performance bottlenecks,” said Makamson. “Tintri allowed me to deploy and run VMware View as it was

intended, and with VMs running on Tintri are faster than my laptop.”

– Ryan Makamson

WSU systems administrator.

VDI Solutions GuideYavapai College Case Study


6Yavapai Case Study

YAVAPAI ENROLLS STUDENTS IN COST-EFFECTIVE

VDI SOULTION WITH TINTRI

OVERVIEW

Yavapai College (YC) is a community college in Arizona established to

provide high quality, convenient, and cost-effective learning opportunities

for the diverse populations of Yavapai County. Across its six campuses, YC

enrolls more than 15,000 students.

YC serves a large county with students commuting from more than 50 miles

away. YC wanted to virtualize student desktops to deliver a more accessible,

cost-effective, and secure environment while preserving the same positive user

experience as a physical desktop infrastructure. YC found through a proof-of

concept that their existing storage would not be able to provide adequate

performance for a large-scale virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment.

KEY CUSTOMER CHALLENGES

Yavapai College deployed traditional storage systems for infrastructure

server VMs. “We are a long-time VMware customer and have virtualized

most of our server environment except for couple of large databases,” said

William Earles, YC’s director of infrastructure services. With experience in

virtualization, YC wanted to deploy virtual desktops to improve access to

services for students. “From the pilot we conducted with VMware View

running on vSphere, we realized that our existing storage would not cost-

effectively scale to support our VDI deployment,” Earles said.

One of the major considerations for the VDI project was to provide a user

experience on par with physical desktops. “Adobe Photoshop and streaming

video applications are heavily used and delivering a quality experience meant

we needed ample performance from our storage system,” said Earles.

Management complexity with traditional storage systems was also an issue.

“We were looking for a simple plug-and-play management for the VDI

storage” said Earles. “From the pilot project, I could see that setting up LUNs,

creating multiple datastores, zoning, and ongoing maintenance would have

been a huge issue for a large-scale deployment on traditional storage.”

TINTRI SOLUTION

YC was excited to leverage Tintri’s flash-based solution for the VDI deployment.

“We certainly wanted to conduct a large-scale pilot using our most demanding

desktop applications to prove Tintri’s fit in our VDI installation,” said Earles.

HIGHLIGHTS

INDUSTRY

Higher Education

VIRTUALIZATION ENVIRONMENT

• VMware® vSphere™ 5.0

• VMware® View 5.0

• HP DL585 servers for vSphere hosts

• Prior to Tintri: VMFS datastores on

NetApp FAS3240 systems and EMC

CX 300 series

VM PROFILE

• Primary student desktops

KEY CHALLENGES

• Reduce cost of desktop deployments

with virtualization

• Deliver a good user experience for

streaming video and photo

processing software

• Manage the complexity of

traditional storage

TINTRI SOLUTION

Tintri VMstore™ T540 dual-controller 13.5TB

storage appliance for serving hundreds of

IO-intensive virtual desktops.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

• Able to deploy virtual desktops at less

than half the cost of physical desktops

• Able to support more than 500 desktop

VMs on a single 3U appliance

• Ease of provisioning and managing VMs

VDI Solutions GuideYavapai College Case Study


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At its Prescott campus, YC deployed a Tintri T540 system that provided

13.5TB usable capacity in a single datastore for serving virtual desktops.

“Installation of the Tintri T540 appliance was very simple and within the

hour we had deployed VMware View linked-clone desktop VMs,” said

Earles. “The pilot test showed that we could easily deploy more than 500

virtual desktops with performance to spare.”

CUSTOMER BENEFITS

“We knew going in what we wanted and the Tintri T540 appliance is able to

handle about 30 percent more desktops than we expected,” said Earles. “We

are able to run the VDI environment smoothly and provide user experience

that is on-par or better than with physical desktops,” said Earles. “Most

importantly, we are able to deploy virtual desktops at less than half the cost of

physical desktops, which is crucial given our budget constraints,” said Earles.

“From our experience, I know we will be able to run even more VMs on the

Tintri appliance. I know this may not be such great news for them, but it will

reduce our cost per desktop even further,” said Earles. “I know we will be

memory bound on our vSphere hosts before we max out the T540 system.”

“Day-to-day administration of the system is very minimal and Tintri’s intuitive GUI

significantly simplifies administration,” said Earles. “Tintri’s VM-level management

abstraction lets us keep tabs on resource consumption for each individual desktop

and proactively address potential problems and plan for growth,” said Earles.

LOOKING FOR TINTRI IN THE FUTURE

“Given the tremendous success with Tintri VMstore in our initial VDI

deployment, we look forward to virtualizing staff desktops as well,” said

Earles. “One feature I would like to see from Tintri is native cloning at VM

level. It would add tremendous value in creating persistent desktops required

for staff. I know it is on their roadmap,” he said.

SUMMARY

Performance, cost-effectiveness, and management simplicity of a storage

system is the key foundation for successful large-scale VDI projects

with hundreds or thousands of VMs. Tintri VMstore fully exploits flash

performance, simplifying deployment of hundreds of VMs in a small

footprint with the ability to easily manage at per-desktop granularity. Cost

effective performance combined with ease of management allowed Yavapai

College to successfully deploy a VDI solution well within their budget.

CUSTOMER SUCESS

“We are able to deploy virtual desktops at less than half the cost of physical desktops, which is crucial given our budget constraints. At the same time, we are able to run the VDI environment smoothly and provide user experience that is on-par or better than with physical desktops.”

– William Earles

Director of Infrastructure Services

VDI Solutions GuideTechnical White Paper


8Tintri for VDI DeploymentTechnical White Paper

Tintri for VDI DeploymentsTECHINICAL WHITE PAPER

bySaradhi Sreegiriraju

Director, Product Management



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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page 10 InTenDeD auDIence

Page 10 InTroDucTIon

Page 10 common VDI comPonenTs

Page 12 sTorage challenges In VDI enVIronmenTs

Page 13 Vm-aware sTorage for VDI

Page 13 easy To seT uP aDmInIsTer

Page 13 sImPle anD raPID ProVIsIonIng

Page 14 granular anD scalable snaPshoTs

Page 15 Performance anD caPacITy fuel gauge

Page 16 Performance DashboarD

Page 17 InsTanT boTTleneck VIsualIzaTIon

Page 18 PreDIcTable Performance

Page 19 IncremenTal scalabIlITy

Page 20 DaTa-cenTer fooTPrInT

Page 20 conclusIon



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INTENDED AUDIENCE

IT managers and administrators will find solutions to common challenges with VDI deployments.

INTRODUCTION

As users increasingly become mobile and require remote access to desktops and applications, IT organizations struggle to deliver

cheap, secure and accessible environments.

Companies have reduced both the capital and operating costs of data centers by virtualizing enterprise applications like Exchange

and SQL Server. At the same time, they’re able to provide higher levels of service to end users. Desktop virtualization, or virtual

desktop infrastructure (VDI), is meant to deliver similar benefits to the desktop.

However, virtualizing desktops poses very different challenges. Shared storage infrastructure cost, performance, and manageability

of the storage layer are among the most commonly cited obstacles to successful VDI implementations. This white paper looks

at the various components of a VDI solution and the storage challenges of deploying VDI, and explores why the unique features

and functionality of Tintri VMstore™ are a perfect fit for VDI deployments.

COMMON VDI COMPONENTS

The following list provides some examples of the architectural components that are common in many VDI deployments:

• Hypervisor: VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer

• Centralized desktop management tools: VMware View Composer and Citrix Machine Creation Services

• Connection broker and desktop assignment/management: VMware View and Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller

Note: Although this white paper uses VMware View terminology and assumes the underlying hypervisor is VMware vSphere,

Tintri VMstore can be used just as easily with XenDesktop using vSphere as the underlying hypervisor.



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Virtual desktop images are hosted on a storage system, which also provides storage for data generated by users of the virtual

desktops. Figure 1, below, shows an example of a VMware View deployment with the storage component circled. Storage is at the

center of VDI deployments, and is often a performance bottleneck for concentrated workloads on hundreds of virtual desktops.

Figure 1: VMware View Deployment

Source: Courtesy of VMware, Inc.



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STORAGE CHALLENGES IN VDI ENVIRONMENTS

Virtualization poses challenges to legacy shared storage systems, which are not intrinsically aware of the virtual environments

they support.

Traditional storage systems:

• Commonly require overprovisioning of commodity storage components, leading to unnecessary capacity and a large

footprint that increases both CAPEX and OPEX.

• Require expertise in deployment and management of additional complexities, such as RAID groups, LUNs, and various

file systems.

• Do not provide clear indicators of performance headroom to accommodate additional growth.

• Lack VM-level statistics to identify issues with individual desktops.

• Are not designed for the concentrated and highly randomized read and write requirements of VDI workloads.

Figure 2 shows the complexity of a typical VDI deployment using legacy storage system architectures, contrasted with the

simplicity of Tintri’s VM-aware storage.

Figure 2: Legacy Storage Architectures vs. Tintri



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VM-AWARE STORAGE FOR VDI

Virtualization owes its success in transforming data centers to the power of VM abstraction. A VM may run on a generic pool of

shared hardware resources, and its CPU and memory usage are easily monitored and modified. Unfortunately, storage for VMs

has increasingly become a bottleneck in server virtualization environments. It poses even greater challenges for VDI environments

with hundreds of virtual desktops provisioned on a single storage system.

Tintri VMstore overcomes these limits. The Tintri VMstore file system is designed from the ground up for VMs. It uses VM

abstractions — VMs and virtual disks — in place of conventional storage abstractions such as volumes, LUNs or files. Purpose-

built for VMs and focused specifically on the problems of VM storage, Tintri VMstore provides management at the same level of

abstraction as the rest of the virtual infrastructure.

Tintri VMstore has a number of capabilities that make it highly suitable for large-scale VDI deployments. The next sections

explore each of those features and functionality in the context of VDI deployments.

EASY TO SET UP AND ADMINISTER

Tintri VMstore can be set up and configured in minutes. No complex storage configuration is required. Once the appliance is

powered on, it’s as simple as connecting it to VMware vCenter Server™ and provisioning VMs on the VMstore. Each node is a

single datastore, making it easy to map to VMware vSphere™ hosts. What’s more, when you add new VMs, you won’t need to

worry about configuring new LUNs, volumes, RAID groups or any other complex storage objects — since there are none.

BENEFIT: Simplified installation reduces installation, support, and maintenance costs substantially.

SIMPLE AND RAPID PROVISIONING

Provisioning and maintaining large number of VMs in VDI environments using legacy storage systems is extremely cumbersome,

requiring many hours of administration. Best practices for legacy storage-based architectures dictate creating multiple datastores

for storing base and replica images, OS disk, persistent disk, and disposable disk on different tiers. These best practices make

provisioning and managing the lifecycle of VMs very complex and error-prone.

With Tintri, each VMstore appliance appears as one datastore with intelligent automatic data placement in high-performance

flash storage, eliminating the need to manage multiple datastores for different needs. Hundreds of space-efficient and high-

performance VM clones can be created from template VMs in minutes, drastically reducing administrative overhead. VMstore

cloning workflows automatically add the virtual desktop VMs to vCenter so they can be provisioned into pools with desktop

management tools such as VMware View.



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BENEFITS:

1) The space efficiency and seamless integration of Tintri VMstore’s clones greatly reduce administrative overhead for

provisioning and maintaining VDI environments.

2) High performance of clone VMs enable a consistent user experience on par with or better than physical desktops.

GRANULAR AND SCALABLE SNAPSHOTS

One of the pillars of VDI is the promise of lower costs through high storage utilization. Traditional shared storage architectures

provide snapshots of storage objects rather than actual VMs. Best practices recommendations vary from containing hundreds

of VMs in individual storage volumes in order to create snapshots, to creating one LUN per VM. These snapshot technologies

lead to inefficient storage utilization, as hundreds of VMs with varying change rates are often snapshotted at once.

Tintri VMstore’s unique space-efficient and granular per-VM snapshots allow administrators to create snapshots of individual

VMs and quickly recover data or entire VMs from snapshots. VMstore appliances support up to 128,000 snapshots for scalable

data protection. Data protection management is also simplified with default snapshot schedules that protect every VM

automatically, while custom schedules on a per-VM basis can be used to tailor data protection needs for specific VMs.

Unlike storage-centric snapshot technologies, Tintri VMstore’s per-VM snapshots make recovery workflows very simple. Files

from individual VMs can be recovered without additional management overhead, dramatically reducing the time to recovery.

BENEFITS:

1) Tintri VMstore’s per-VM, space efficient snapshots provide for quick-recovery of data or entire VMs from snapshots.

2) The large number of snapshots provides scalable protection for hundreds of VMs.

3) Recovery workflows are simplified to meet strict RTOs and SLAs.



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PERFORMANCE AND CAPACITY FUEL GAUGE

A unique “fuel gauge” gives you immediate visibility into both the available storage capacity and performance headroom on any

Tintri VMstore appliance (see Figure 3, below). For the first time, this gives you predictable storage performance with a single,

easy-to-use metric. Two aggregate indicators with drill-down capability let you keep tabs on your VMs. The unique performance

gauge allows users to quickly identify how many more virtual desktops can be deployed on a given VMstore based on the

resources available.

Figure 3: Tintri VMstore Fuel Gauge

BENEFIT: Managing performance is as easy as managing capacity. Administrators can quickly estimate how many more virtual

desktops can be provisioned on a given Tintri VMstore, taking the guesswork and complexity out of provisioning storage for VDI.



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PERFORMANCE DASHBOARD

Tintri VMstore’s dashboard view quickly identifies VMs with the most changes in performance or capacity requirements in the

past seven days (see Figure 4, below). Administrators need not understand how VMs map to the storage components; all they

need to know is the name of the VM. Tintri VMstore manages the details behind the scenes by integrating with vCenter.

Figure 4: Tintri’s Performance Dashboard

The per-VM granularity for tracking performance and space changes allows administrators to keep tabs on desktops that may

be using undue storage resources. The dashboard is arranged to provide a summary view to show the top VMs, making the

information much more readily actionable.

The per-VM performance and space change information also helps administrators in environments that share the Tintri VMstore

for hosting both server and virtual desktop workloads. Administrators can immediately see the changes in storage resource

needs of the different categories of VMs running on a VMstore, and ensure that different workloads do not affect each other.

BENEFIT: Provides administrators with a quick way to monitor end user experience on a per-VM basis.



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INSTANT BOTTLENECK VISUALIZATION

Tintri VMstore visualizes per-VM performance bottlenecks for instant diagnosis. Performance troubleshooting is one of the most

tedious VM management tasks. With Tintri VMstore, administrators can quickly see a performance and storage utilization profile

on a per-VM and virtual disk basis, and have instant visibility into latency from the guest OS layer to the storage layer (see Figure

5, below). They can see per-VM or per-vDisk latency at any infrastructure layer, identify the source of performance issues, and

take immediate action. VMstore also maintains historical latency data automatically, giving administrators a graphical seven-day

view of performance.

Per-VM and virtual disk performance visualization allows VDI administrators to quickly troubleshoot on a per-desktop basis to

provide end users with unparalleled service.

Figure 5: Instant Bottleneck Visualization

BENEFIT: Visualizing per-VM performance and latency allows administrators to quickly troubleshoot issues and provide consistent

service levels.



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PREDICTABLE PERFORMANCE

Disk access latency and IOPS performance requirements are magnified in large virtual desktop deployments because of the

number of VMs. These can become highly unpredictable in a legacy disk-based storage system. Flash performance, in contrast, is

much easier to characterize, is location-independent, and is much more uniform. Legacy storage systems must employ complex

caching and tiering technologies to take advantage of flash, creating ongoing administrative headaches for the storage and

virtualization teams.

Tintri eliminates traditional tiering by automating placement and writing directly to flash when appropriate. The Tintri file system

is designed specifically to deliver flash performance without requiring manual configuration or VM placement. It deduplicates

and compresses data in flash using a very small block size to provide much larger effective capacity. For example, the base image

for a VMware-linked clone can be entirely cached or pinned in flash to service all read IOs from flash directly, thereby providing

low and uniform latency even during boot, log-on and application launch storm-type workloads, even with hundreds of virtual

desktops.

VDI deployments also produce small random-write IOs that are not suitable for legacy disk-based storage systems. Tintri VMstore

services the write IOs directly from cost-effective multilevel cell (MLC) flash with its innovative file system. This solves random-

write IO amplification issues with MLC that previously were unsuitable for enterprise environments. Figure 6 shows the consistent

submillisecond latency achieved with a Tintri VMstore at high IOPS and throughput.

Figure 6: Datastore Performance

The Tintri file system minimizes swaps to disk with automated placement, to ensure only active data is kept in flash. The typical

mixture of hot and cold data in virtualized environments often include minimally-active or periodically busy virtual desktops. The

Tintri file system adapts to periodic workloads to ensure they are not evicted from flash during idle periods, and provides good

read/write performance even for VMs that reside mainly on disk.



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The VM-aware nature of the file system allows Tintri to provide performance isolation for each VM. By automating data

placement and keeping the most active data sets in flash, VMstore provides QoS on a per-virtual disk and per-VM basis. The

Tintri file system automatically uses the combination of flash and disk that best suits the activity of the VM, adjusting it over

time to prevent variations in a few desktop VM IO patterns from causing disruptions for other VMs. This can appreciably help

VDI installations to prevent runaway desktops from using up system performance, and provide consistent performance to all

desktops hosted on the system.

BENEFITS:

• Much larger effective flash capacity accommodates higher VM density, and provides a fast response time and end-user

desktop experience.

• Write-intensive VDI workloads are serviced from flash, ensuring consistent end-user desktop experience.

• Minimally active desktops are not evicted from flash, providing a consistent desktop experience.

• Provides consistent performance to end-users to meet service-level agreements, without the need to overprovision

storage to meet peak and unanticipated IO workloads.

INCREMENTAL SCALABILITY

Hypervisor administrators have perfected deploying incremental hosts for increasing CPU, network and memory resources to

scale compute resources. The hosts can be managed from vCenter as a cluster.

Tintri VMstore integrates software and hardware capability into a field-serviceable storage appliance, built from the ground up to

run VMs. The Tintri file system is designed to take full advantage of flash, multicore CPUs and 10GbE to deliver the performance

needed for hundreds of virtualized desktop environments.

Traditional SAN-based storage architectures typically map 500GB LUNs as datastores, creating a large number of storage objects.

Each Tintri VMstore appears as a single 13.5 TB NFS datastore per appliance.

Tintri reduces the number of storage objects to manage by a substantial factor. With Tintri, even large VDI deployments can start

out using a single datastore. As the environment grows, the storage can scale incrementally simply by adding additional Tintri

VMstore appliances. Because each appliance appears as a datastore, it’s easy to manage them seamlessly from vCenter.

BENEFIT: Tintri VMstore can scale to meet both capacity and performance demands together, reducing CAPEX and OPEX.



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DATA-CENTER FOOTPRINT

Tintri VMstore is designed to fully capitalize on the most cost-effective flash technology available. The Tintri file system integrates

flash as a first-class storage medium rather than as a bolt-on cache to fully leverage continued improvements in flash price and

performance. MLC flash — combined with inline deduplication, compression, and a unique flash/disk file system — enables Tintri

to provide 13.5 TB of flash performance in a small 3U footprint, keeping the total per-VM acquisition cost (CAPEX) very affordable.

The small footprint of the appliances saves substantially in operating expenses for power, cooling and floor space.

BENEFIT: The small footprint of Tintri systems provides substantial savings from reduced rack space, power and cooling, thereby

reducing the cost of storage per virtual desktop.

CONCLUSION

Desktop virtualization can provide huge benefits in streamlining the IT infrastructure, reducing costs, and increasing security and

compliance, while making desktops and applications more accessible.

However, storage remains the primary obstacle to deploying and maintaining virtual desktop infrastructures. Tintri VMstore, with

its innovative VM-aware file system, leverages cost-effective MLC flash to deliver high performance in a very small footprint that

can scale incrementally to meet growing needs. Tintri’s file system uses deduplication, compression, snapshots, clones and thin

provisioning to provide the unparalleled VM density required for deploying virtual desktops. Tintri VMstore allows administrators to

overcome the complexity, performance and cost obstacles preventing organizations from deploying VDI.

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