LSI has worked with VMware to deliver what it says is 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.
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.
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.
