The possibilities of VDI Deployments With Sanbolic Melio

The possibilities of VDI Deployments With Sanbolic Melio -

Following my four-part series " Enabling Next-Generation Virtual delivery infrastructures for modernity Data Center ", this article will explain how Sanbolic Melio helps Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp customers to maximize the value of their virtual desktop and application delivery infrastructures.

With its unique and extensive capabilities, Sanbolic Melio provides Citrix VDI customers numerous benefits that a direct and positive impact on the overall cost of the solution, including: and

Streamlined data (server desktop operating system image files) and storage management
Significantly reduced memory consumption and improved storage utilization
High availability of XenApp server and desktop operating system images, databases and user profiles
Seamless infrastructure scale-out (add more servers and / or storage "on the fly")
Exceptional virtual desktop performance (striping (RAID 0), QoS, Flash and SSD support, "intelligent "data placement, custom data tiering)
uniform (farm-wide) image protection on cluster-aware snapshots
Enhanced fault tolerance (elastic file system with no single point of failure, data mirroring (RAID 1, 10 , 5, 50, 6, 60))
Simple and cost (multi-site) disaster Recovery
reduced infrastructure costs and complexity (enables convergent / hyper-converged infrastructures)
hardware agnostic (works with industry standard (commodity) compute and storage hardware)
Supports physical, virtual and cloud-based instances.
No per-feature licensing fees (includes extensive storage management capabilities and advanced data services enablement)

For this article to focus on optimized data and storage management we go

in particular, we will discuss how Melio helps Citrix VDI customers benefit from provisioning Services (PVS), an integral part of XenDesktop and XenApp, for making their virtual desktop and application delivery infrastructures.

with Melio with PVS enables administrators to create, manage, maintain and deliver XenApp server and desktop operating system images (vDisks) to tens of thousands of devices with minimal effort, while allowing (HA high availability ) of PVS

. Note: PVS HA function remain appliances vDisks during server connected allows storage or network failures, thereby ensuring user productivity is maintained at unexpected failures.

Before we discuss how Melio helps realize customers these advantages, let the two methods for the provision of PVS in HA mode check

Distributed HA (based on the replication)
HA Central This model

Distributed HA model

(Shared Storage requires) the use of replication brings and requires that a copy of every vDisk to be placed on a local (NTFS formatted) drive on each server PVS. This means that if you have two servers in your farm PVS and create a new vDisk, you have to copy the vDisk to the second server. And if you make changes (ie, OS updates, anti-virus updates, add / remove applications, etc.) to the contents of the vDisk, you need the (updated) vDisk be copied to the second server (again).

In environments with only two PVS servers and less than a handful of vDisks, this approach may prove sufficient for some. Of course, if this small area were to grow (additional XenApp to support servers and desktops) and server more PVS were needed to provide HA available and to ensure efficient load balancing of vDisks, this option would both as each vDisk be unwieldy and inefficient would have to be stored on each PVS server, resulting in a significant decrease in valuable storage capacity.

Think ... if you three PVS servers in the farm and five vDisks (each at 60 GB), instead of using just 300GB (5 x 60 GB) hard disk space, you would need to use

about 00 GB (5 x 60 GB x 3 PVS server) or almost 1 TB. Talk about a waste of memory ( and money )! Not to mention introduced by the additional data management effort to copy by updated vDisks under the PVS server or replicate the vDisks to ensure that synchronized at any time on all servers.

And do not forget to protect all the vDisks, which is also more demanding. Instead of a single snapshot of all vDisks create on a hard drive, you should create multiple snapshots and maintain (one for each drive) vDisk consistency throughout the PVS farm.

In summary replication to ensure introduces additional data and storage management overhead, the inefficient use of valuable storage resources (providing cost upwards drives) to protect and unnecessary steps of image files. What's more, the infrastructure only exacerbates these problems horizontal scaling, detracting from the fundamental value of the PVS (centrally creating, managing, maintenance and deployment of image files) for XenApp and XenDesktop VDI implementations.

Let us now take a look at the "Central HA" model that requires shared storage, either file-based (CIFS / SMB) or block-based (Sanbolic Melio).

CIFS / SMB Based PVS HA deployments

put simply, a file share from a file server hosted with PVS HA results in a single point of failure, severely limited power and virtually no scale-out, while a hardware-based file serving solution such as to allow a NAS device, proprietary leads (island) storage management, to a limited extent, vendor lock-in and a fairly high price, especially when multiple devices bundled must be to scale a PVS implementation. Moreover, to allow location (for disaster recovery) file shares with high availability of vDisks on PVS servers in different data centers, can introduce significant performance issues, often require customers vDisks between data centers to replicate affect the performance to minimize.

Melio-Based PVS HA deployments

with Melio, allowing customers PVS HA and load balancing, while the challenges and restrictions for replication and file shares / NAS are connected, avoided. This is achieved by PVS Server to consolidate on a single pool of flexible, scalable and highly available storage, which can be accessed (read-and-write) by all PVS servers in a farm simultaneously, regardless of whether the servers in a single location or at multiple locations (geo-distributed data centers). Besides enabling vDisk HA and load balancing, vDisk management and maintenance is greatly simplified and the capacity vDisks is needed to save significantly reduced, lower storage-related costs drastically.

Many customers also their desktop write cache store files on Melio shared volumes, further investment in its block-based storage, the use of power, which are necessary, the potentially intensive IO requirements typically encountered in the mid to to support larger size VDI implementations. With two vDisks and write cache files are highly available, reach customers for the provision of XenApp servers and virtual desktops throughout the enterprise environments a flexible, scalable and robust platform.

It is important to note Melio's server, storage and hypervisor-agnostic, which means all the advantages sited above, with each brand and model of server and storage hardware, external (SAN) or internal ( server-side) storage, as well as any storage protocol (iSCSI, Fibre channel, FCoE be achieved. Shared SAS, etc.) and helps VDI client vendor lock-in to avoid

here is how easy it is Melio Shared storage to create use:

installed to provide and display of block storage to all PVS servers in the farm, an administrator on each server Melio and opens the management Dashboard (on a server).
, the administrator selects the option to create a new volume, it has a label and drive letter, drags-and-drops one or more disks (external or internal) click on the new volume, and "save" the create shared disk.

Once the common volume is mounted on all PVS servers, data storage is created in the PVS Administrator console for the vDisks and (optional) Write-cache files, and the "Load Balancing "function is activated in the properties of each vDisk. working in HA mode, the PVS server vDisks work together on the shared volume on XenApp servers and virtual desktops to stream.

The challenges and limitations associated with the replication, file shares and NAS to avoid customer PVS are for deployment using their virtual desktop and application delivery infrastructures able take advantage of the inherent (centralized ) to take advantage, instead of reducing them.

In future articles we will discuss how Citrix VDI customers to realize unique and comprehensive features in the use Melio other significant advantages, virtual desktop performance, including improvements and enables cost-effective DR, and the database and the user profile a to ensure high availability.

For more information on Sanbolic Melio and the software, see www.sanbolic.com.

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