by John Dodge, Director, End User Computing
It is my great pleasure to introduce the VMware Reference Implementations series! Our Reference Implementations shed light on real world VMware EUC deployments, giving you the insider’s view of the architecture and the behind-the-scenes perspective of key decisions, and the lessons learned along the way.
As compared to reference architectures, reference implementations focus on actual customer environments, and whenever possible we’ll share the benefits realized. Given that these case studies come right from production environments, we respect the right for a featured customer to reserve some of the details for themselves. If you would like to see your company’s VMware EUC implementation story featured in this space, please ask your account team to reach out to me personally!
Kicking off our Reference Implementation series is a case study from Global Service Provider who sought to provide a large scale, managed services desktop deployment leveraging VMware® Horizon View™, complete with systems resiliency and full site redundancy, in a design delivering better than PC performance at very low OPEX and CAPEX. This case study features a key component known as a virtual storage appliance (VSA). VSAs are rising in popularity due to their ability to reduce storage latency by accommodating burst IO through a variety of approaches. Our customer chose ILIO Diskless VDI from Atlantis Computing, one of the featured partners in our VMware Horizon Fast Track program. Read about this case study here.
Atlantis ILIO presents a portion of ESXi host RAM to VMware Horizon View as an NFS datastore utilizing both in-line deduplication and compression methods. The ILIO datastore is reserved for View linked clone system disks, while user data and profile is stored on traditional shared storage. Using ESXi host RAM for storing the system disks, the Global Service Provider was able to eliminate a substantial portion of storage required for a production View implementation while providing 300+ IOPS per desktops. From their point of view, the ability to provide a user experience that exceeded a typical PC experience without a significant investment in storage in a linear scale-out model were the keys to their business plan.
