Youth sports are all about kids having fun. They play, they sweat, and hopefully have a great time. And boy do they build up an appetite.

Choosing the right refreshments during halftime, or the right restaurant after the game can be difficult. Are a couple large pizzas going to be sufficient, would a pizza buffet be in order?

Choosing a team’s celebratory dinner is not unlike properly sizing a VDI solution. The exercise of sizing VDI for “up to X number of users” can be difficult. User count expectations can also be skewed when the workload is different than expected. Mileage may vary.

VMware Virtual SAN really shines at meeting performance needs while being cost effective and easily scalable through additional node or drive additions. If more storage is needed, add additional drives, or additional nodes contributing storage. If only compute is needed, simply add hosts that do not contribute storage. Very easy to scale.

Just like that baseball team at the buffet, knowing how to cost effectively handle consumption, whether it is pizza, or IO, is imperative. When that adolescent team of all-stars hits the buffet line, the restaurant manager better have enough pizza for them. If they don’t, they need to get the kitchen staff tossing some pizza dough. Even when the number of people eating doesn’t increase (restaurants have a maximum seating capacity), the amount consumed can be more than was originally expected.

Buying another pizza every time the team wants more, can be expensive. Buffet = MORE PIZZA = SAME PRICE.

When using VMware Horizon View 6 Advanced or Enterprise Editions, VMware Virtual SAN hybrid licensing is included, and all flash is a small add-on. It is important to note, that cost to consume storage doesn’t change as users require more resources.

Working along with storage partners Avago and SanDisk, network partner Brocade, and compute partner Dell, VMware put together a reference architecture to demonstrate the capabilities of an all flash Virtual SAN architecture. With this configuration we show how a good mix of appropriately sized compute, along with SSD can, at sub-millisecond latency, meet the needs of hungry group of little leaguers a demanding VDI workload.

The team leveraged LoginVSI 4.1 to determine the maximum number of desktops this 4 node cluster would support was 850. LoginVSI tests were performed for office and task workers at 100% concurrency. The all flash VSAN architecture provided excellent response times & an average latency below 0.5ms and 0.6ms for the task worker and office worker loads respectively. At full load, the VSImax was not reached.

Sub-Millisecond latency, even at high CPU load.

Additional Horizon View operational tests were performed, including:

• Initial deployment of the desktops: 90 minutes. That’s an average of 6.35s to deploy each desktop.
• Recomposing the desktops took: 90 minutes – Again, only 6.35s per desktop.
• Refreshing the desktops only took: 85 minutes – Only 6.0s per desktop.
• Booting all desktops from powered off (Boot Storm): 34 minutes – 2.4s per desktop. Whoa!

The results were measured from the time the operation was begun, until the point in time which all Virtual Desktops were available in the View Management Server for use by clients.

Those are some very impressive numbers. VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 can easily meet the needs of the most demanding workloads, including Virtual Desktops. More information about VMware Virtual SAN 6.0, can be found on the Virtual SAN Product page and the new features in Virtual SAN 6.0 on the VMware web site. Abid Saeed also covers this reference architecture on the VMware Developer Blog, in The Power of Partnership: All-Flash Virtual SAN for VDI.

More detailed information around the configuration, hardware specifications, and testing methods used, can be found in the white paper.

Pizza for groups of 10 or more, is not covered in any of this material.