I’m pleased to offer a guest post from one of our highly-valued partners on a number of initiatives, including Virtual SAN and vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO): SanDisk. This post talks about the latest All-Flash Virtual SAN solution designed for business critical applications and VDI.
by Patric Chang, Senior Director of SanDisk’s Strategic Partner Ecosystems
Profile: http://itblog.sandisk.com/author/patric-chang/
In my last guest blog on VMware’s Virtual Blocks, I shared an outstanding Virtual SAN solution that delivered 3 Million New Orders per Minute on a 4-Node All-Flash Virtual SAN cluster. Since then, the server partner solution is listed as a certified Virtual SAN Ready Node in two capacities for running business critical applications.
Now, we are thrilled to complete another All-Flash Virtual SAN solution with Supermicro!
Slick Power and Simplicity
What’s most exciting about this latest solution is its slick power and simplicity. This 2U, 4-node Virtual SAN solution is built using a flash trio that employs a single caching SSD and two (2) high capacity 4TB SSD capacity drives for each node. This architecture was tested to support 730 VDI desktops using linked clones for knowledge users and 230 full clones using a power user profile.
The results using VMware’s recommended View Planner VDI test setup and the cluster configuration are summarized as follows:
Based on the reference architecture resulting from this project, Supermicro is now making available two All-Flash Virtual SAN Ready Nodes with 16TB or 32TB per node. Here you can see the full BOM of the 32TB solution:
From Bare Metal to VSAN in Minutes
One valuable benefit of this and other Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from SanDisk and our partners is the speed you can deploy them for real-world workloads, namely business critical applications (e.g. SQL Server, Oracle) and VDI Desktops (linked clones and full clones). With this solution, you can go from bare metal to a Virtual SAN for VDI Users in minutes in a few simple steps:
To be able to deliver industry leading Virtual SAN solutions for VDI and business critical applications, our virtualization and application experts at the SanDisk Data Propulsion Lab apply a robust methodology to work with VMware and our partners. Let me share some steps of these processes.
- First, we work with VMware to certify our products for Virtual SAN. Simultaneously, we work with OEM partners to validate the most optimal flash products for their server requirements that will deliver maximum performance, integration and reliability.
- Second, we work closely with both the OEM partner and VMware to determine the business applications or VDI workloads customers want to run and test these on the Virtual SAN solutions, which are documented as Reference Architecture. This enables us to fine tune the solution to deliver optimal results.
- Finally, our partners provide these solutions as Virtual SAN Ready Nodes. This is a huge advantage for customers who can be confident that these Ready Nodes best leverage the performance and reliability of SanDisk flash and have been tested for the business critical applications and/or VDI desktops they plan to utilize.
Join VMware and SanDisk for a Free Webinar
Jase McCarty, VMware Senior Technical Marketing Manager and I will talk about these Virtual SAN Solutions and Ready Nodes in an upcoming webinar with InformationWeek:
Transforming Customer Business Apps and VDI Desktops with Flash-enabled VSAN Ready Nodes
Thursday, January 28, 2016
10AM PST
Register here!
If you are unable to attend this webinar and have any questions on the SanDisk flash solutions or Virtual SAN Reference Architectures, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].
We look forward to sharing our experience in building and using these solutions with you!
