Guest blog by Patric Chang, Sr. Director Global Alliances, Fusion-io
In the new VDI world, customer expectations have progressed from robust, snappy virtual desktops to having ready access to corporate and personal applications, using multiple rich media on preferred devices to easily access content from any location. Satisfying customers requires using highly efficient and scalable infrastructure to deliver VDI on premise or on public or hybrid clouds. IT professionals can address heightened customer expectations by utilizing the simplicity, performance and cost effectiveness of VMware Horizon 6 and Fusion ioVDI. Horizon 6 speeds VDI deployment with an architecture built for an on-premise and cloud-based future and delivers consistently great experiences across devices, locations, media and connections through a unified workspace. ioVDI optimizes desktop performance so that IT professionals can deliver the following value:
- Offloading write workload from storage arrays by up to 80% with Write Vectoring. Non-persistent desktop write activity is directed to fast server-side flash that resides in close proximity to virtual desktop VMs, making desktops more responsive. Persistent data write activity is vectored to shared storage.
- 6x -10x improvement in boot times with Transparent File Sharing. ioVDI reduces shared storage performance dependencies even further by allowing desktop images to simultaneously share commonly requested files from fast server-side flash, speeding both individual desktop boot times and large-scale desktop startups.
- Reduced VRAM provisioning by 88%. ioVDI alleviates memory contention by presenting flash as a natural extension of RAM for page swaps. This allows administrators to reduce VRAM per VM without impacting performance and frees CPU cycles for use by VMs.
- Consistent 50ms desktop response times. ioVDI delivers consistent 50ms desktop response times by eliminating most reads and writes to storage arrays.
Figure 1: VMware Horizon 6 with ioVDI and ioMemory from Fusion-io
More details of these and other benefits and how you can achieve them are described in this white paper.
With a Fusion-io solution, resident doctors in a National Health Service region in the United Kingdom serving 500,000 residents found that their 5500 Horizon virtual desktops performed faster than physical desktops. In the case study, Martin Powis, the IT manager, said, “It’s a very simple architecture that scales at low and predictable cost.” As Roy Disney declared, “It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” This is very applicable to the hard VDI decisions you will have to make to address your customer’s heightened VDI expectations.
Read more on how Horizon 6 and ioVDI help prepare you for the new VDI world.
