Friday, October 25, 2013

Why does de-dup and thin provisioning matter in VDI?


VMware released a new Horizon View Large-Scale Reference Architecture document. The document was based on real-world test scenarios, workloads, and infrastructure system configurations using VCE Vblock Specialized System for Extreme Applications. This Vblock is composed of Cisco UCS server blades and EMC ExtremeIO flash-based storage array.

This VCE Vblock is specifically intended for solutions like VDI because the flash-based array ensures performance and responsiveness that is required by virtual desktops to provide a respectable user experience.

The VCE Vblock Specialized System for Extreme Applications uses EMC XtremIO storage arrays as primary storage for Horizon View virtual desktops and EMC Isilon NAS to store user data and Horizon View persona data.



The environment was scaled to support 7,000 users. They used a View POD design with a Management block and a Desktop block. The Desktop block consisted of 8 pools; six of the pools had 1,000 desktops and two of the pools had 500 desktops.

VDI Port Mapping


Tuesday, October 15, 2013

VMware Aquires Desktone


In a very interesting move, VMware has committed to DaaS with the acquisition of Desktone. This will help VMware in its effort to develop a complete end user computing suite. This acquisition will immediately make VMware the leader in the DaaS platform, and starts to address some short comings it had against its primary rival Citrix.

Desktone provides the only virtual desktop platform built for delivering desktops and applications as a cloud service.

“Desktone is a leader in desktop-as-a-service and has a complete and proven blueprint for enabling service providers to deliver DaaS,” said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “By bringing Desktone’s innovative platform in house, VMware can accelerate the delivery of DaaS through its network of over 11,000 VMware service provider partners while helping to shape and lead the future of the industry.”

“The combination of VMware and Desktone’s global partner network will allow customers in all regions to benefit from the economies of scale provided by DaaS,” said Peter McKay, president and chief executive officer, Desktone. “With the Desktone platform already certified with the VMware vCloud® technology, VMware vSphere® and VMware Horizon View™, customers will be able to quickly modernize and move their desktop infrastructure to the cloud and open new possibilities for customers, users and service providers.” 
Companies are now facing a different reality. In particular, they have employees that bring their own devices to work. VMware sees an opportunity to bring a broad portfolio of end user computing solutions to its customers.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Horizon View 5.2 Pod Design Overview






The Horizon View components fit together within a physical architecture, based on the concept of building blocks and pods. This scalable approach allows IT professionals to build out a solution as users migrate to virtual desktops.

A Horizon View pod integrates five 2,000-user building blocks into a View Manager installation that you can manage as one entity.

By taking this approach, you can be fairly user-agnostic and deploy additional blocks or pods with varying performance characteristics, geographical locations, or access mechanisms as required.

A typical Horizon View deployment can consist of 500 to 10,000 virtual desktops hosted across a single or multiple ESXi clusters managed by a management building block. In the following example, each ESXi host has two CPUs with eight cores, providing 16 cores in total and 128 desktop virtual machines per host. The building block has two clusters with 1024 desktop virtual machines in each cluster.

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