vmworld 2013: enterprise architecture design for vmware horizon view 5.2

Enterprise Architecture Design for

VMware Horizon View 5.2

John Dodge (@vdiinfo)

Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici)

EUC5434

#EUC5434

2

Agenda

Large scale administration features of Horizon View 5.2

Storage design considerations

Architecture best practices

3

Large Scale Administration

4

Overview

Benefits

OPEX savings with fewer pools to

manage in multi-thousand user

deployments.

No need to split pools on the basis of

insufficient host density, or insufficient IP

addresses in an address range.

Large Pool & Multi-Network Support

OPEX Savings with fewer pools to manage

Large Pools: Eliminate 8-host per pool

limit – now 32 hosts with latest View and

vSphere 5.1

Multi-Network: Network within a pool can

be split with multiple network labels.

Initially offered via powershell API.

5

Overview

Benefits

OPEX savings less admin time spent on

common operations

Reduced complexity of architecture &

less scripting with image updates for

pools supporting 24-7 operations.

Accelerated View Admin Scale, Performance & Availability

OPEX savings as deployments grow large

Enhanced VC Scale: Deploy pods of up

to 10k desktops with a single VC!

Reduce Time: Data caching for fast

Admin-UI response with large lists of

desktops and sessions

Improve Availability: Rolling-Refit keeps

min # desktops available during

recompose, refresh & rebalance ops.

6

One vCenter Server and 10,000 Desktops

vCenter Server

ESXi ESXi ESXi ESXi ESXi ESXi

View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

Desktop

VMS

7

P

vCenter Server


View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

Desktop

VMS

Powering on, provisioning, maintenance

8

Maintenance Operation with One vCenter Server

Maintenance window

vCenter Server


View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

Desktop

VMS

http://www.geeknewscentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/hourglass.jpg

9

Maintenance Operation with Multiple vCenter Servers

vCenter Server vCenter Server vCenter Server


View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

Desktop

VMS

Maintenance window

http://www.geeknewscentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/hourglass.jpg

10

Reduced Parallelism Across Desktop Pools

vCenter Server


View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

Desktop

VMS

View LDAP Configuration: Pool 1 Pool 2 Pool 3

Pool 1 Pool 2 Pool 3

11

Powering on, provisioning, maintenance

vCenter Server vCenter Server vCenter Server


View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

View Connection

Server

Desktop

VMS

12

Storage Design Considerations

13 Confidential

Data Diversity

Templates

OS

Pagefiles

vSwap Files

User Data

User

Persona Corporate

Apps Anti-Virus

Definition Files

ThinApp

Packages

Parent

Snapshots

Master

Images

Full Clones

Replicas

Linked

Clones

App

Installers

User Installed

Apps

Security

Updates

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Storage Design Challenges

Improperly sized storage implementations are difficult to fix

Good user experience and user acceptance are critical for success

Balancing burst IOPS and footprint

Diversity of storage options make it difficult to make an

informed choice

ESXi host RAM Solid state disk SATA hard drive

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IOPS vs. Footprint: The Bell Curve

There is a dramatic difference between IOPS avg to IOPS peak

• Avg Win 7 IOPS ~20

• Avg Win 7 boot storm IOPS ~300

• Avg recompose IOPS per VM ~600

Avg IOPS If you design

for this

All of this IO is buried in

latency

16

Coping with the Curve

Latency ruins user experience

Traditional storage architecture demands spindles

for performance, larger disks for footprint

The VDI challenge is small disks aren’t cost effective,

therefore a lot of footprint is wasted

Recognize that disk IO and footprint requirement vary

by the type of files or data stored

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Technical Details

View Storage Accelerator (aka CBRC)

Overview

• Use caution in memory overcommit

situations

• Uses digest files for vmdks for

metadata/hash information

• Disk sizing must include the digest files

• 5-12MB per GB of vmdk

• In-memory cache of common

block reads

• Applicable to all types of desktops

• Completely transparent to the guest

• 100% host based – Up to 2GB RAM

• Decrease Read IOPS by up to 60%

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0

2000

4000

6000

8000

10000

12000

14000

16000

18000

Peak IOPS Avg IOPS

IOP

S

IOPS

View StorageAccelerator Disabled

View StorageAccelerator Enabled

Validation Results: Windows 7 – Single Host Boot Storm

~80% reduction in peak IOPS

~45% reduction in average IOPS

~65% reduction in peak throughput

~25% reduction in average throughput

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

Peak throughput Avg throughput

MB

ps

Bandwidth consumption

View StorageAccelerator Disabled

View StorageAccelerator Enabled

19

Strategies for Burst Demands that Don’t Break the Bank

Acceleration products

Atlantis Software ILIO

Nexenta VSA for View (NV4V)

In-storage block tiering

EMC FAST Suite

NexentaStor

New storage technology

SSD

Flash drives (e.g., Fusion IO)

All-Flash arrays (EMC XtremIO)

VMware Virtual SAN

Outlier:

Converged

Appliances

All-in-one server,

storage, and

virtual file system

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Virtual SAN for Horizon View Desktops

Reduce storage TCO with a “virtual SAN” on local storage

Overview

Leverage new Software Defined Datacenter capability with Storage Virtualization

Uses local storage on ESXi hosts

Presents an abstracted data-store that spans multiple hosts for resiliency and removes single point of failure risks

Benefits

Reduce up front CAPEX costs of VDI

Easily scale up IOPs with compute

21

Let’s Talk about Space

When using PCI Flash or SSD, Space becomes more of an issue

What things impact space?

• View Storage Accelerator (CBRC)

• Full clones / vs linked clones

• Linked Clone recompose frequency

• Memory reservations

• Persistent Disks

• Storage deduplication

View 5.2 / vSphere 5.1 SESparse Disks

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Overview

Benefits

Reduced storage capacity requirements

(lower CAPEX) for Persistent Desktops,

even on lower-tier hardware

View Composer can be used for

provisioning simplicity, even if recompose

is never used (e.g. knowledge workers)

Space Efficient Disk Utilization

More efficient use of storage capacity

Leverages new vSphere 5.1 capability…

A new disk format for VMs on VMFS

Reduces grain size & more efficiently

utilize every allocated block by filling it

with real data

Unused space is reclaimed and View

Composer desktops stay small

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Space Efficient Disks Make Persistent Desktops Cost Less

Base

Image

Desktop A

Desktop B

Desktop C

(~10GB)

100MB

100MB

100MB

Things start out small with View

Composer and Linked Clone

Technology. You only have 1 copy of a

Windows base image (with the OS

and Apps) once for many desktops.

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Base

Image

Desktop A

Desktop B

Desktop C

(~10GB)

2GB

400MB

1GB

But the delta disks for each

desktop grow over time on VMFS

as Windows frees blocks which

the hypervisor is unaware of

With traditional virtual disks

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Base

Image

Desktop A

Desktop B

Desktop C

(~10GB)

100MB

100MB

100MB

Space is reclaimed when a View

Composer Recompose or Refresh is

performed, but this isn’t an option for

many user types (e.g. knowledge

workers with user installed apps)

Recompose


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40GB

40GB


Base

Image

Desktop A

Desktop B

Desktop C

(~10GB)

40GB

If no recompose or refresh is

performed, delta disks used to grow

substantially over time – eventually

as big as the logical size of the disk

Before Space Efficient Disks with this View Beta and vSphere 5.1,

this resulted in greater storage capacity costs for knowledge workers


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2GB


Base

Image

Desktop A

Desktop B

Desktop C

(~10GB)

400MB

1GB

With the new space efficient disk

format, delta disk still grow to hold

real data generated by the OS,

Apps & User

With Space Efficient Disks

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Base

Image

Desktop A

Desktop B

Desktop C

(~10GB)

1GB

300MB

800GB

But a background space

reclamation process automatically

harvests unused blocks so the

disks are constantly shrunk back

to a minimal size

With Space Efficient Disks

Reclaim!

This allows you to use View Composer to provision VMs and save

storage capacity, but NEVER have to recompose or refresh

29

What about VM Swap?

When creating virtual machines, there is an option to place

the virtual machine vswap file on local storage. The key

considerations are:

• Reduce the size of shared desktop datastores. For example, this can show

savings of between 94GB-366GB (1.5GB average memory and 64-250 virtual

machines per datastore) based on number of desktops per datastore and the

memory allocated to a virtual machine

• Removes the vSwap read/write I/O from the shared storage device, reducing

the overall I/O profile

• Slight impact on performance of vMotion and HA operations

• Slight increased CPU and memory requirement on the ESXi host

for vswap file I/O

• Local storage requirement for the ESXi

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3D in VMware Horizon View

31

vSGA – Improved Shared 3D Graphics With Multiple Virtual Machines

Now with support for select AMD/ATI graphics cards with latest vSphere

Overview

vSphere in 2013 adds AMD/ATI Graphics Cards

Supports select NVIDIA & AMD/ATI Graphics Cards

Shared access to physical 3D graphics cards for high

performance graphical workloads

Desktops see abstracted VMware SVGA device for

maximum virtual machine compatibility & portability

Share single 3D graphics card with multiple VMs

Benefits

Expanded vendor choice for graphics acceleration

Enables truly high performance graphics

Cost effective with multiple VMs sharing single 3D

graphics card

Full compatibility with vMotion, DRS for hosts

lacking physical 3D graphics cards

32

vDGA – Deliver Workstation Class 3D Graphics with VDI Desktops

Full workstation class user experience with dedicated NVIDIA graphics card

Overview

Dedicated access to physical GPU hardware for 3D

and high performance compute workloads.

Uses native NVIDIA drivers

CUDA and OpenCL compute APIs supported

Best for super high performance needs like design,

manufacturing, oil & gas

Benefits

Compliments vSGA cost/performance

True workstation replacement option

Full capabilities of physical NVIDIA GPUs

High performance compute GPU option

33

Architecture Best Practices

Don’t treat desktop storage like server storage

Use storage tiering appropriately

Understand your desktop workload

Trust “industry numbers” but verify

Segregate your server and desktop workloads

Don’t try to deploy in strict accordance to a reference architecture guide

Evaluate the new SSD, flash, and VSA backed storage platforms

34

Other VMware Activities Related to This Session

HOL:

HOL-MBL-1301

Horizon View from A to Z

Group Discussions:

EUC1001-GD, EUC1006-GD

View with Matt Coppinger or Andre Leibovici

THANK YOU

Enterprise Architecture Design for

VMware Horizon View 5.2

John Dodge, VMware

Andre Leibovici, VMware

EUC5434

#EUC5434