Today we bring over an interesting article written by Larry Smith in which he reports his experience building a home-made NAS for VMware’s vSphere hypervisor.
He had been using so far Nexenta 3.x but, as he had to move to 4.x, the possibility of running a GlusterFS cluster using the two NAS servers that he used for Nexenta was called into question. Learn all the details reading this article.
In some cases, when analyzing the storage needs for a VDI platform we look at saving disk space when using template-based or non-persistent desktops. Nevertheless, it is necessary to bear in mind that all the I/O operations on disc in a standard job platform are made on local discs located in each post.
In a VDI environment, all these I/O operations take place concurrently on shared storage. Tasks such as updates of OS patches, antivirus, user logins scans… produce a large amount of concurrent I/O operations that are referred to as “storms”. These storms produce a deterioration in the performance of the storage because these I/O operations are accumulated in queues and this, obviously, causes an irregular performance of the virtual desktops.
Choosing a storage technology for VDI because of vendor loyalty may lead to a wrong decision. Administrators should take into account different points to select the storage for virtual desktops.
VDI expert Brian Madden explained at a seminar in New York the storage requierements for a virtual desktop infraestructure and the importance of choosing the right option.
Desktop virtualization as a new ally for Education, the benefits of application virtualization and software defined storage are the most interesting topics we talked about in this blog for the last two weeks according to our readers.
If you didn’t have the chance to read them when we published them, find below the links to these articles so that you keep up with the latest and most interesting news suggested by our followers:
VMworld Europe 2014 opened today in Barcelona. In this first day of one of the most outstanding virtualization and cloud computing events, VMware announced new products, program and service that add to the growing list of innovative solutions for end-user computing. Among them is VMware Horizon FLEX that will enable enterprises to centrally provision, manage and secure virtual desktops and applications running locally on Macs and PCs, using policy-based controls to more securely embrace bring your own (BYO) policies.
In addition, a new cloud service for desktop disaster recovery will allow organizations to protect their business and enhance workforce continuity, expansion of cloud hosted services in Europe will open opportunities for customers, and a new storage program will help customers quickly predict and control virtual desktop deployment costs at scale.
Most SMBs find really difficult to afford server virtualization costs. That’s why HP has launched a new software defined storage alternative (SDS). The company will give free licences to its clients for more than 72 petabytes SDS capacity.
The only requirement to join this program is to purchase an Intel Xeon E5 v3 processor. After the purchase, a 1TB HP StoreVirtual VSA software licence will be obtained.
This software allows implementing the SDS with a deployment of shared storage which adapts itself to the virtual server that executes Linux Kernel Virtual Machine, VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V.
