Increased Desktop Virtualization Stirs I/O Solution Providers to Action

virtualization second coming of centralized computing Gartner reported server

What's holding things up? With the promise of instantaneous deployment, centralized management, user mobility and simplified data protection, why haven't more companies leaped into the VDI void? One problem has quite literally has been the scale-up speedbump.

Sure, your customer's servers cranked along nicely through the pilot phase and straight through the implementation of about 200 users. Then the roof fell in and complaints rained down about slow performance, sporadic availability, frequent crashes and data loss.

The cause is often I/O bottlenecks, which can quickly overwhelm a VM server when large VDI systems are deployed on a one-image-to-one-user basis. "Desktops represent the next explosion of I/O; they're more random and less predictable," said David Bieneman, CEO and founder of Liquidware Labs, which develops platform-level VDI solutions. "Desktops are used to having their own disks, not sharing in a pool."

So naturally, there will be wait times as large numbers of virtual systems queue up to read and write data, Bieneman said. "And desktop users are less forgiving of wait times," he said.

Liquidware Labs products examine user and application traffic patterns over a period of time and identify the most I/O-intensive applications. These can be isolated and deployed on dedicated storage and network channels designed to handle high I/O traffic levels while VM servers and file systems dish out a small number of desktop master images.

"Profiling data center and desktop environments with our approach allows you to design around observed storage I/O patterns," said Bieneman. For VDI systems, this information allows systems designers to more precisely match shared storage capacity and type to what is needed to maximize performance and minimize cost. "Administrators don't have to store one-to-one per user; they can store perhaps 64 users to one storage space."

NEXT: Cache is King Of course, there are other approaches to solving the problem of I/O bottlenecks. On Aug. 15 Xsigo claimed to be first to market with a virtualized server fabric that it claims can provide up to 30X performance improvement on a company's existing servers, storage and virtual machines. According to the company, Xsigo Server Fabric provides a super-high speed interconnect for a rack of servers and strorage, where it says as much as 80 percent of virtualization traffic exists.

Claiming similar performance gains is Dataram with its XcelaSAN storage optimization appliances for Fibre Channel.

Then there are the software solutions. Virsto One, for example, virtualizes the I/O layer and turns random transactions into sequential ones, allowing hard drives to work better. Virsto offers versions for Hyper-V and VMware.

Another fine example is VMTurbo, which starts by building an inventory of vCenter VMs, servers and storage systems, and scanning VDI traffic over time. According to Philip Thomas, the company's director of technical marketing, the software then performs an analysis of the storage, IOPS, latency, UI activity, CPU and memory utilization ratios, traffic peaks and averages and "helps you decide what should run where," he said.

The software offers remediation options for VMs in need of better performance that include starting anew, moving to another server, adding or reconfiguring a service provider and so on. Remediation actions can vary based on the nature of the application (mission critical or otherwise) and can be set to recommend, or execute automatically or manually. Monitoring functionality is included in the free VMTurbo Community Edition.

The CRN Test Center has looked closely at Virsto and VMTurbo solutions and found them to be technologically solid.

NEXT: Take it Personally Will the VDI surge of today fizzle out like the terminal services craze of the 1990s? Bieneman believes it won't, and cites major technological advances as the reason. "The problem with the Citrix Metaframe [-style] solutions was that [they] lacked the ability to have a personality. Users were pooled on a server and had to give up individuality," he said.

While this cookie-cutter approach was fine for bank tellers, order entry clerks and other task-based workers, Bieneman thinks that it failed with thought workers because "those users want their own apps for day-to-day business productivity," which was impossible or impractical on terminal servers.

And it's impractical for large-scale VDI as well. That's where so-called profile management products such as AppSense Environment Manager and RES Workspace Manager (formerly PowerFuse) come in.

Competing with these tools is Liquidware Labs' own ProfileUnity, which offers a migration path from a physical Windows desktop to a virtual one, enabling a vanilla Windows image to be used for booting, and layering user data, applications and settings on top.

Beyond that, the Liquidware Labs solution also works with VMware to designate high-traffic apps for ThinApp provisioning. "We let you profile the desktop workload, measure and identify each application that uses high IOPS, and place those on a SAN with plenty of bandwidth." ProfileUnity then places an icon on that user's desktop that when clicked opens a stream to the app. "That app is not stored in the user's virtual image, but it runs in their memory space" as if it were running locally, Bieneman said.

The Liquidware Labs/ThinApp solution serves the dual purpose of removing the storage capacity requirements of the application from the user's image and moving its I/O footprint from the VM server's file system to a storage system that can be designed for (and dedicated to) high-demand workloads.

Catching On, Catching Up

The virtual desktop infrastructure is catching on, and movements within the VDI market indicate that its strongest players are strengthening their positions. The Citrix acquisition of RingCube in August will allow Citrix to incorporate RingCube's vDesk user profile manager into its XenDesktop solution. Citrix in May picked up Kaviza and its popular VDI-in-a-box product.

Caching solution maker Fusion-IO in August came closer to finalizing its acquisition of IO Tubine, which will add server-side caching for VDI deployments to its line of client-side products.

And as roadblocks arise, the industry is knocking them down with solutions and advances in technology to make VDI easier to deploy, more flexible to use and safer and more reliable. And whether or not you believe Mike Fratto's prediction that VDI won't change much in 2011, the reseller opportunities abound.