Vmware View and cloud storage?

[karatebum]

[socalblue]

Go slow & benchmark things in great detail. What we are finding is there are two major issues with VDI (Doesn't matter what flavor):

1. Storage churn
- VDI tends to be serial access, heavy on the write
- Expect the need for 30-40 storage I/O's per second, PER VDI USER

2. Network I/O at the back-end (data center) level
- Access from the VDI servers to storage & applications
- Traffic between VDI servers & end devices

Cloud storage - Look for a vendor that supports gateways (local cache with sync). Sending real time VDI storage traffic out to a cloud provider is going to do some fun & interesting things to ones Internet traffic patterns.

One of the reasons VDI is taking time to take off is the scaling issue. What works well in the lab tends to bog down in production.

I would ask these questions:

1. What are you trying to achieve?
2. Who are the target users & what do they do?
3. What data are you willing to let out to a cloud provider? What are the ramifications of a security failure? Can I per encrypt the data?

[orchard]

Also consider email. We had users with large PST files that really impacted traffic when they did their initial connection.

[dotalchemy]

VMWare View 5 introduces what they call Persona, which from what I can see simply abstracts the user profile into a separate virtual disk, which just gets attached to their session in the background whenever they connect to a new VM.

If I were to be looking at anything like this, then I'd probably have the VDI images running from the fiber attached SAN and have the profiles disk running over NFS from the netapp.

Mind, having said that, Netapp actually ran some tests and released a whitepaper a while back, showing that VMWare performance over NFS wasn't that much worse than over fiber, so maybe I'd push the spawned VM's to NFS too.

Departmental shares can then just be mapped as usual with GPO's.

[karatebum]

Guys, thank you so much for the input.

We're definatly hesitent to put a sustained load on our netapp with VDI, so we're just basically doing a beta proof of concept before we buy the farm with the vendor.

I havn't made too much progress on this, basically i've been playing around with box.net and webdav mount, and it works, files transfer pretty darn fast, but there is a hesitation when browsing folders(automatically detect proxy is turned off in IE), and no way it will work for redirected profiles. I havn't seen any of the problems people are reporting in the box.net forums, maybe more then 2 days of playing around is needed.

Socal, my boss reported he still wants local copies, which was something I know he probably told me earlier, but I didn't remember before i started the quest. So thats on the bucket list now

Orchard, we use OWA to a hosted exchange company, people hated it at first, but became used to it after a while, but good point absolutly.

Dotalchemy, we love NFS, we use it to mount the vmdk files, absolutly has been tight for us for 2 years now. I'll check out the Persona thing, I read in their forums up and down, you gotta use a 3rd party application for profile managmeent everybody seems to report, and it looks like their stepping in aparently, I have no experince with any of these apps, but it looks like the way to go

thanks guys, and if you have any other sugestions, please post them. trying not to screw myself and this project