QNAP Systems has released its “All-flash Solution for 500 VDI Seats with VMware Horizon View” white paper that was tested using Login VSI for benchmark performance. This white paper presents detailed storage architecture references and testing results for the deployment of 500 VDI users using QNAP ES1640dc, and provides a dependable VDI sizing guide for organizations looking for a reliable storage solution to deal with resource-demanding VDI applications.
“This white paper is a very good reference for helping organizations to better understand the performance-optimized design of QNAP Enterprise ZFS NAS and its proven ability to conquer the challenges in VDI environments,” said Waterball Liu, Product Manager of QNAP, adding “QNAP Enterprise ZFS NAS provides a solid, near-zero downtime IT foundation for building a successful business.”
This test was conducted using a QNAP ES1640dc with the storage array filled with SSDs grouped as one storage pool and attached to the hypervisor server using 10Gbps iSCSI, and a persistent-desktop VDI deployment with VMware Horizon View 6 and linked clones. Simultaneously deploying and booting 500 desktops showed the capabilities of the Enterprise ZFS NAS single controller, finishing the deployment task in one hour, and booting in less than 7 minutes. Only 290GB of allocated storage was observed in the pool after creating the desktops, proving the benefits of the ZFS-based operating system that features thin provisioning, overprovisioning, compression and inline deduplication to save up to 99% of the capacity in VDI environments.
Advantages and key findings for VDI of QNAP Enterprise ZFS NAS are highlighted in the white paper:
- ZFS: Supports essential enterprise storage functions including powerful storage expansion, flexible storage pools, high-performance SSD caching, near-limitless snapshots and cloning, data deduplication, in-line compression, thin provisioning with reclaim, and more.
- Dual controller architecture: During the VDI solutions test, a single controller was used to handle a heavy workload from 500 VMs, while the second controller managed the data center (virtual servers) of VMware vSphere and Horizon View infrastructure.
- All-flash solution: Empowers extremely-demanding applications like VDI and ensures system uptime regardless of the changes in VDI IO patterns and behavior from different users.
- Data reduction: Block-based data deduplication optimizes storage usage against redundant/repeat data, and in-line data compression helps shrink data size.
- Data protection: ZFS is designed for data integrity, and uses end-to-end checksums to detect and correct silent data corruption.
- Cache acceleration: Achieves intensive read and write IO operations; the volatile cached data is protected by NVRAM and mSATA SSD modules.
- VAAI support: VAAI increases performance by offloading server loading for ESXi servers to the array, freeing up computing power resources and maximizing the power of the virtual machines.
- Unified storage: Supports both block and file-based storage (iSCSI LUN and Shared Folders).
