Maximising density and performance for VMware Horizon View™

LSI is working closely with VMware to deliver breakthrough virtual desktop density for VMware Horizon View™ deployments. Collaborative testing with VMware Horizon View using a single LSI® Nytro™ WarpDrive® application acceleration card achieved concurrent support for 200 active virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads on a two-node cluster with no storage latency.

“Our testing of the LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards confirms Nytro technology can support demanding VDI workload environments with simplified management and increasing security and control,” said Mason Uyeda, senior director of technical marketing, End-User Computing, VMware. “LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards will help enable our customers to overcome the latency demands of VDI-intensive workloads to deliver high performance and return on investment.”

VDI environments generate I/O-intensive workloads that cannot always be adequately addressed by traditional hard disk drives. Typical VDI workloads generate small, random write-intensive bursts of I/O during peak periods, forcing IT organisations to over-provision expensive storage resources to meet that peak demand. The Nytro WarpDrive card helps to eliminate infrastructure guesswork and improve storage utilisation by providing a flash-based solution with both predictable and reduced application response times.

Testing Details
To demonstrate the benefits of deploying the Nytro WarpDrive card in a VDI implementation, LSI and VMware emulated demanding, real-world end user workloads using Login VSI version 4.02 and View Planner 3 to drive 200 active desktops. The LSI Nytro WarpDrive card comfortably supported the 200 active desktop workloads, achieving a VSImax rating of 280 before exhausting CPU resources. The demonstration also showed that at 150 desktops per ESXi node, eight hosts can easily scale to 1,000 concurrent desktops at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional storage area network deployments with similar performance characteristics.

“Working closely with VMware, we’re able to confirm through this real-world application that IT organisations can comfortably deploy 150 desktops per node with 75 to 80 percent concurrency and a VMware Horizon View clone deployment time of under 13 minutes,” said Robin Wagner, senior director of marketing, Datacentre Solutions Group, LSI. “We’re excited to collaborate with VMware to provide native VMware drivers in VMware vSphere® and help bring this breakthrough VDI density and performance to our mutual customers.”