In today’s special webcast event VMware officially announced the release of VMware Horizon 6.0. This version is designed to meet the demands of today’s mobile workforce and optimized for the Software-defined Datacenter architectures and superior operating models.
The announcement was packed with a lot of new great new features and capabilities for the entire Horizon Suite of products, but one of my personal favorite announcements was around the support of Virtual SAN storage policies.
This new release delivers an unmatched level of integration with Virtual SAN by to leveraging all of the key benefits Virtual SAN has to offer:
Radically simple management and configuration
Storage policy base management framework,
Performance, capacity, and resilient foundation
Linear scalable capabilities (scale up or scale out).
By leveraging vSphere’s new policy driven control plane and the storage policy based management framework, Horizon 6.0 is able to guarantee performance and services levels to virtual desktops by leveraging VM Storage Policies defined for virtual desktop based on their storage capacity, performance and availability requirements.
Horizon 6.0 automatically deploys a set of VM storage policies for virtual desktops onto vCenter Server. The policies are automatically and individually applied per disk (Virtual SAN objects) and maintained thorough out the lifecycle of the virtual desktop. The policies and their respective performance, capacity and availability characteristic are listed below:
VM_HOME – Number of disk stripes per object 1, Number of Failures to tolerate 1. This corresponds to the default policy of Virtual SAN.
OS_Disk – Number of disk stripes per object 1, Number of Failures to tolerate 0 [2014-08-08: updated to correct value]. Again, this is the default policy.
REPLICA_DISK – Number of disk stripes per object 1, Number of Failures to tolerate 1, Flash Read Cache Reservation 10%. This policy dedicates some of the SSD or flash capacity to the replica disk, in order to provide greater caching for the expected level of reads that this disk will experience.
Persistent Disk – Number of disk stripes per object 1, Number of Failures to tolerate 1, object space reservation 100%. This policy ensures that this type of disk is guaranteed all the space required.
The following video illustrates the new Horizon 6.0 integration with Virtual SAN policies:
The combination of Horizon 6.0 and Virtual SAN provides customers with the ability to deploy persistent and non-persistent virtual desktops without the need for a traditional SAN.
By combining the lower cost of server-based storage with the availability benefits of a shared Datastore, and having an additional punch from SSD-based performance acceleration, Virtual SAN yields major cost saving with the overall implementation of a VDI solution.
– Enjoy
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In today’s special webcast event VMware officially announced the release of VMware Horizon 6.0. This version is designed to meet the demands of today’s mobile workforce and optimized for the Software-defined Datacenter architectures and superior operating models.
