Virsto Blog

Virsto Adding Citrix XenDesktop Support

Eric Burgener — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:29:05 +0000

According to analyst firm Gartner, the VDI market is almost evenly split on ESX/ESXi between the leading virtual desktop front ends VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop, with each contender laying claim to about 40% of the market. With the recent announcement of our support for XenDesktop 5 on ESX/ESXi, we’re now offering Virsto’s performance, space-efficiency, cluster-awareness, and time-saving benefits to roughly 80% of the VDI market on vSphere.

In the same way that we support VMware View 4 and 5 on vSphere, we are integrating in with XenDesktop in a way that completely preserves the deployment, re-deployment, and refresh workflows that XenDesktop administrators are using in Citrix Desktop Studio and/or Desktop Director.

No re-training is required – we just transparently use Virsto during the cloning step instead of either PVS or MCS, almost instantly creating up to thousands of high performance, space-efficient, cluster-aware clones. This saves hours (and in some cases, days) on overall desktop provisioning times and, unlike host-based SSDs that you might be thinking about using to address storage performance issues, fully supports failover. Once the desktops are created, unique identities assigned, and placement into desktop pools is complete, the administrator manages them in EXACTLY the same way that non-Virsto XenDesktops would be managed.

With a simple software install and the purchase of NO additional storage hardware, you will find that Virsto will cut the storage cost/desktop in half, double the desktop density that you can support per host, and not require that you purchase additional memory or are forced to deploy with more expensive 4 socket motherboards. Our log architecture allows you to handle I/O spikes like those generated by boot, login, application, and logout storms without storage over-provisioning, which means that you’ll need at least 50% less storage to meet your virtual desktop deployment requirements.

With Virsto, many desktop performance requirements can be met without SSD. But if you choose to deploy VDI with SSD, Virsto’s unique logging architecture and tiered storage capacity delivers read and write acceleration as if the entire VDI environment was running on SSD, only using 95% less SSD capacity than an SSD-based cache. User profile data can be stored on cheaper SATA disk, while experiencing SSD performance.

If you’re looking into virtual desktops on vSphere, using either View or XenDesktop, I invite you to check us out. And if you have a VDI project that has stalled because of storage performance or cost issues, we can get that project back on track for you.

View 5.1’s Storage Accelerator a Great Complement To Virsto

Eric Burgener — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:17:52 +0000

Earlier this week, VMware announced the release of View 5.1 with a new Storage Accelerator feature. Since storage acceleration is part of the Virsto value proposition, a question that is likely to come up is what the effect of Storage Accelerator on the Virsto value proposition is. The net net is that Storage Accelerator does not diminish what Virsto offers in View environments and the two potentially complement each other very well.

From VMware’s own description, Storage Accelerator is a host-based, read caching approach that provides acceleration for desktop reads using RAM. VMware didn’t talk about their caching algorithms, but if it works like most caching algorithms, it will page in blocks based on frequency of access, and since it will do that in “chunks”, you’ll get other blocks near to the ones actually accessed that are likely to be accessed as well in the future. Caching algorithms by definition look “backwards” so you don’t get the performance the first time you access a block, only once that block has already been moved into cache.

In VDI environments, the golden master (the OS disk that includes the blocks that are shared across all the desktops) will get moved to cache pretty quickly, so you’ll get good performance there out of Storage Accelerator. This will help during read intensive operations like boot storms, and will also provide performance improvements whenever the golden master needs to be read. What it won’t do is address write performance.

If you’re familiar with the I/O patterns in VDI environments, then you know that they tend to be very write-intensive, much moreso even than virtual server environments. Write to read ratios will vary across environments, but its not unusual to have 80% writes and 20% reads during “steady state” VDI I/O. I attended the San Luis Obispo VMUG meeting on Monday, Apr 30, where VMware in a presentation suggested that the steady state planning number should be more like 90% writes, 10% reads. Because of this heavy skewing towards writes, write performance is much more of a problem in the storage slowdown that occurs in VDI environments, and the Storage Accelerator does nothing to address that.

Virsto’s log architecture, on the other hand, is perfect for boosting write performance using very little log capacity. In fact, the more random and the more write-intensive your environments are, the greater performance improvements you’ll see from using Virsto. You can use Virsto together with Storage Accelerator to comprehensively speed up both writes and reads, leveraging a mix of storage and memory to do so. Or, if you do not want to use memory for read speedups, you can create a very small tier 0 out of fast storage (like FC 15K RPM spinning disks or SSD) to get read speedups all the time for all the desktops that reside on it. The tier 0 is of course a great place to put golden masters.

There are a few considerations when looking at the memory vs disk decision. Main memory’s a bit expensive (you can buy 2TB of memory for a Dell PowerEdge R910 for about $75/GB, which is a little more than what you’d pay on a $/GB basis for enterprise class SSD), and if you’re going to create big memory-based caches, you’re probably going to have to buy a 4 socket server to accommodate the capacity you want. 4 socket servers are quite a bit more expensive than 2 socket ones (you’ll pay about $28K list for a Dell PowerEdge R910). The bigger your cache capacity, the better chance the block you want to read is cached, so you’ll get a more comprehensive (read) performance speedup.

Don’t want to invest in new 4 socket servers? You’ll need to take a look at your existing main memory capacity and decide if you want to max that out with this approach. Don’t forget to take any additional vRAM licensing costs into account (if you go over your currently licensed thresholds). If you’ve looked at all this and still want to use Storage Accelerator with Virsto, you’ll get comprehensive performance improvements across both writes and reads.

If you decide against using main memory as a big cache, Virsto by itself still gives you options for comprehensive speedups across both writes and reads. Leverage our tiering to create a fast tier, and put your highest performance disks in that fast tier. You get blazingly fast write performance for all VMs all the time from our logs, and you’ll get great read performance for the shared binaries (that’s the first thing you should look at putting in the tier 0) and any other VMDKs that you’ve decided to lock in there.

But Virsto’s value proposition goes way beyond just performance. Whether you use Storage Accelerator or not, you’ll get huge space savings from our thin provisioned vDisks without giving up any performance, you can fully support features like vMotion and failover (VMware HA), and you can provision high performance, space-efficient storage almost instantly, allowing you to spin up new VMs literally in seconds. And with our support for VMware View, you’ll get access to all this in a manner which preserves all the familiar View workflows in tools like View Composer, View Manager, etc. so there is minimal re-training.

So if you’ve been considering Virsto because we more than double the desktop density your existing storage configuration can support, or you like the fact that you can deploy at your current density using half as many disk spindles, or you like cutting hours off your desktop deployment, re-deployment, or refresh times without any performance impacts, you’re still good to go. With View 5.1, you just now have an additional configuration option for turbo charging your read performance in VDI environments.

What’s wrong with the scorecard?

Mark Davis — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:00:56 +0000

In last week’s post, I thanked the good folks at Ideas International for publishing their storage hypervisor scorecard. Ideas joins other industry analysts such as ESG, EMA, ITCandor, Rainmaker Files, Gartner, Storage Switzerland, IDC, and Jon Toigo in legitimizing the newly recognized storage hypervisor product category.

In this post, I’d like to explain a concern I have about the way some folks are defining the term storage hypervisor.

Categories don’t emerge cleanly

It is never clear in the early days exactly what the defining characteristics of the category are or what to call it.

Do you recall the early days of the product category we now call sport utility vehicles (SUVs)? For years, everybody had a different name and a different definition.

Lots of people try to come up with their own definition. Every vendor that wishes to have their products known as a member of the category has their own spin. Industry pundits of all walks – analysts, reporters, bloggers – weigh in with their own definitions.

We should not expect clarity, especially in the early days of a category.

Is anyone out there old enough to remember the early days of the storage area network? In the 1990s, when the people at Compaq (remember them?) started using “SAN” to define their vision for a new kind of network, to be distinguished from a LAN or a WAN, all heck broke loose for a couple years. Some companies, like Sun Microsystems (remember them?) embraced the term since they had been shipping Fibre Channel storage arrays that supported a whopping two servers. In contrast, lots of industry experts sneered that the SAN category was vile marketecture. Others jumped on the bandwagon and claimed their products belonged in the category, even though many did not build anything that we’d today say fulfilled the criteria for membership in the SAN product category.

So it is, and so shall it be for the Storage Hypervisor

One phenomenon you can bet on happening, especially when there are billions of dollars of market opportunity at stake, is for some people to define the category in a way that is inclusive of old technologies which can’t legitimately fulfill new requirements.

My last post noted that one surefire way to tell that a category definition doesn’t have real meaning is if

“The definition of that category is not clearly distinguishable from any other category.”

Storage Virtualization versus Storage Hypervisor

In their recently published scorecard, an analyst firm defined a storage hypervisor according to the features offered by products in the category. Here are the features they used to score vendors:

Automated tiering
Architectural benefits
Performance monitoring / reporting
Local replication
Remote replication
High availability / disaster recovery
Maximum capacity
Performance scalability
Thin provisioning
Physical provisioning
Virtual provisioning
Migration
Management centralization
Planning capability
Heterogeneous storage pooling
Server hypervisor support / integration

Anything about this list catch your eye?

I found it striking! Maybe it’s because I’ve been involved in storage virtualization since before that category even had a name.

Do you see it too?

If a bunch of storage industry experts were shown this list, and asked what product category was characterized by that set of features, what would they answer?

I’m betting most would say generic storage virtualization.

The list above is in no way distinguishable from a list of criteria for storage virtualization.

And that’s a problem.

There’s no point in a new category defined the same as an old category.

It’s great that the market is beginning to accept the term storage hypervisor. It’s certainly good for Virsto. We started using the term in late 2007. So you can bet we're gratified to have the term gain currency.

But a storage hypervisor isn’t just another name for storage virtualization.

In the next post, let’s plan to review a little storage industry history. There's a cautionary tale to tell.

Thank You Ideas International

Mark Davis — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:30:31 +0000

Last week Ideas International posted their inaugural scorecard for storage hypervisors.

As the company that first used the term storage hypervisor, Virsto Software applauds Tony, Angelina, and Joe at Ideas for giving voice to this important topic. Thanks guys!!

We think the topic of storage hypervisors is vital to datacenter and cloud computing.

How vital?

We believe the emergence of the storage hypervisor – with Virsto leading the charge – will transform computing no less than have server hypervisors. That’s right, Virsto’s goal over the next decade is to be as crucial as VMware has been over the past ten years. We have strong feelings about this.

How strong?

We’ve been thinking about and developing a storage hypervisor since 2007. It’s gratifying to have analyst firms like Ideas give the term credibility. We’re so glad to have people join the revolution.

So you might think that I’m really happy about Ideas International’s scorecard.

You’d think wrong

Well, to be honest my feelings are mixed. Of course we’re happy to have Ideas join other analysts like Enterprise Strategy Group, Storage Switzerland, Enterprise Management Associates, Mesabi, among others, in lending their credibility to the storage hypervisor wave. We’ve seen articles about this emerging product category in places like Network Computing, InformationWeek, and TechTarget's SearchVirtualStorage, and I am delighted to see the groundswell of interest from so many.

But overall, I’m not thrilled about the Ideas International scorecard.

Where’s the beef?

My major beef isn’t with Ideas’ ratings of Virsto’s storage hypervisor or of others, although I can quibble with some of the assessments.

My big issue with Ideas’ scorecard is their implicit definition of what a storage hypervisor is.

Words matter. Concepts matter.

I don’t expect that everyone will agree in all respects with my definition of the term storage hypervisor. And I know no analyst can ever fully agree with my definition.

Now that the topic is getting hot, others may catch up with Virsto in their thinking. But for now it’s safe to say that a company of people who’ve been breathing storage hypervisors 7 days a week for more than four years probably have some pretty well thought out ideas on the topic.

The term storage hypervisor has to have some meaning. It needs to be pretty clear whether a product either is or is not in the category.

This is where I have concern about the scorecard published last week.

Two ways to know that a category is too generic

The definition of that category is not clearly distinguishable from another category.
Any vendor who wants to get in on a hot trend can simply rebrand their product as a member of the category.

In a series of posts over the coming weeks I’ll have more to say. A lot more.

We want to get a debate going, so we encourage comments, tweets, articles, blogs, analyses, theses, rants, or musings that link back to our posts here. Again, sincere thanks to our friends at Ideas for prompting what should be a good discussion.

For now, a parting thought

What if, over a hundred years ago, some clever engineers and entrepreneurs invented a new kind of vehicle that had a self-contained mode of propulsion based on internal combustion, electric, or steam power?

What if, back then, they started calling their inventions “automobiles”?

What if, back then, makers of horse-drawn carriages added feed bags to their propulsion systems, and called the things they built automobiles?

And what if no one ever called them on it?

SSD’s Future Will Be About Efficient Usage

Eric Burgener — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:42:25 +0000

There’s no doubt that SSD is here to stay. But it’s not a new technology. Vendors like Texas Memory would sell you a storage device that operated at near memory speeds in the 1980s, but it was so darn expensive that there weren’t many applications where its use could be justified. As SSD prices have come down, there are more applications where its use can be considered.

Given that “performance” is a system-level issue, SSDs are overkill as a way to solve storage performance problems for most environments. It’s like trying to kill a fly with a bazooka. Sure it works, but is there a cheaper way – like maybe a fly swatter – that can achieve the same end result? Those familiar with Amdahl’s law and a little experience benchmarking SSD in virtual environments know that the performance speedup you get from SSD is not related to the native performance of flash but more related to whatever bottleneck you hit next after you’ve removed storage performance as the limiting factor.

What are you really doing when you deploy SSD? If you expect to increase the performance of your system by what the native performance capabilities of flash would suggest, you’re in for a bit of a surprise. What you really do is that you remove storage latency as the performance bottleneck to your system (assuming that is in fact the bottleneck) and now have a new, non-storage bottleneck that you’ll hit way before you get to what the native SSD performance speedup might suggest. Are you familiar with Amdahl’s law? Based on that, the way you deploy is SSD is critical. What you should be thinking about doing is deploying as little of it as possible to remove storage as the performance bottleneck, not just throwing SSD at your “storage performance” problem.

Back in 2008 (I think, or it might have been earlier) Gartner took a look at what was happening to both spinning disk and SSD prices, and predicted that by 2013, both would cost about the same on a $/GB basis. As SSD dropped from thousands of dollars per GB to hundreds and now to tens, we have rightly started thinking about how to use it in more areas. While SSD by itself is really a performance pure play, it does have some other interesting implications given that the single biggest factor you need to take into account when sizing storage configurations of spinning disk has been IOPS (with availability and capacity as secondary considerations in most cases). When you front end spinning disks with some SSD, you end up needing fewer spinning disk spindles to meet a given IOPS requirement , and the cost savings from that can be used to defray at least part of the cost of the SSD.

But the prediction that spinning disk and SSD will be basically equivalent by 2013 is suspect at best. Right now, list prices for enterprise-class SSD (which is more expensive because you need to front end it with NVRAM and software to address wear leveling, random write performance and a few other issues specific to SLC NAND flash) are around $60 - $80/GB at list. If you’ve got a Red Bull-enhanced CFO who can sufficiently beat your storage vendor up, you may be paying street prices in the $25 - $30/GB range. That’s a heckuva lot more than the $1 - $2/GB that that same Red Bull-enhanced CFO is probably paying for your highest performance spinning disk. Sure, SSD is generally at least 10x faster (and sometimes a lot more) than spinning disk, but you’re likely not going to see that in your environment because there’ll be some other roadblock that arises well before that happens.

I attended a meeting of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Computer Measurement Group last month where one of the presenters gave a pretty convincing argument about why enterprise SSD prices are probably not going to go down much going forward. One of his proof points was that on a $/GB basis over the last 18-24 months, SSD has stayed at pretty much the same cost. And that with all the added cost needed to produce enterprise-class SSDs anyway, any future drops in flash prices weren’t going to have too much of an impact on the overall $/GB of those drives. I didn’t verify that for myself, but I did note it.

When SSD is deployed out there, it’s usually deployed as some form of cache. Even if its deployed in a tiered storage environment, its still basically used as a cache. If it’s a write through cache design, you get no write performance speedup, so its purely a read performance play. And even then, only if the blocks you want to read are already sitting in cache. The more SSD capacity you’ve thrown at your cache, the better chance you’ll enjoy read performance improvements. But because SSD is still very expensive relative to spinning disk, you’re being pulled in two directions: to maximize the performance gains you’ll reap you want lots of it, but to keep from blowing your budget you may only be able to afford a little bit of it.

Using SSD in a cache, while it does result in performance improvements, is not a very efficient way to use it since it requires relatively large capacities, and the $/GB metric is where SSD performs worst. By all means, we should be leveraging SSD to improve the overall performance of our systems, but we need to use SSD as efficiently as possible to realize the performance gains that it will actually (not theoretically) produce. In other words, what’s the smallest amount of SSD capacity we need to deploy to move the bottleneck beyond storage performance and to whatever the next roadblock is?

This brings me to my final point, which is about using SSD in virtual computing environments. SSDs are great for read performance, but these environments tend to be much more write intensive than physical computing environments. If you’re looking to leverage SSD in virtual computing environments, caching is not the most efficient way to speed up writes. Logs are a much more efficient way to use SSD to speed up write performance since you typically need at least an order of magnitude less of it, and in many cases even a lot less than that. A log architecture, effectively implemented, will give you write performance speed ups for ALL of your VMs ALL the time. Forget about issues like write through vs write back or whether or not the blocks you care about are cached. Continued high SSD costs (relative to spinning disk) will encourage us to look at better ways to leverage SSD to get what we need out of it.

Looking at ways to address read performance requirements in virtual computing environments more efficiently with SSD is another interesting topic, but I’ll leave that one for another day.

Ready for VDI lift off?

Gregg Holzrichter — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:38:21 +0000

Virsto VDI Survey: 46 Percent of VDI Projects Stalled Due to Cost and Performance

A survey released by Virsto today finds that virtualized desktop initiative (VDI) projects are of great interest to a majority of medium- and large-enterprise IT organization respondents, however the promise of VDI is being compromised due to cost, performance challenges and end user complaints. Information gathered from the survey reveals a clear disconnect between the growing interest in VDI and the benefits that such projects are realistically able to deliver.

Virsto changes the economics of storage in VDI

Virsto for VDI, first launched in April 2011, is the industry's first VM-centric storage hypervisor that arms desktop architects and virtualization teams with a new approach to deliver storage efficiency and rapid VDI provisioning to remove one of the largest obstacles to VDI adoption: the excessive cost of storage per virtual desktop.

With Virsto, customers can jettison the large costs associated with centralized storage in VDI by getting up to 10x more out of block-based and/or SSD storage capacity, while delivering up to 10x better end user performance, and reducing the time to provision and patch desktops by up to 99%.

This combination of improved performance, increased capacity utilization, and simplified, accelerated desktop storage provisioning acts like a turbo-booster to your stalled VDI project, and delivers cost-effective lift off. In a recent 2,000 seat VDI benchmark with Microsoft for example, Virsto reduced the cost of storage per desktop by over 50%.

Virsto's entrance into the VMware market with support for VMware View and vSphere earlier this year, with support for Citrix XenDesktop on ESX just announced, provides support for all three of the leading VDI front ends, and native integration with vSphere and Hyper-V.

This just might be the year that VDI finally achieves lift off.

What Windows 8 Hyper-V R3 Storage Enhancements Will Mean For Virsto Customers

Eric Burgener — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:01:44 +0000

Last September, Microsoft released some information about what customers could expect to see in Windows 8, and at the very end of February the Windows 8 beta became available. There’s been some interesting activity on the blogosphere about it (see a good blog from Jason Perlow here).

What are the enhancements?

There are a couple of interesting storage enhancements in Hyper-V R3, including VHDX, ODX, built-in deduplication, support for SMB 2.2, and the introduction of ResFS (Resilient File System).

VHDX: Larger Capacity VHDs

In Hyper-V R2, VHDs can be up to 2TB in size, but in Hyper-V R3 with VHDX that has increased to 64TB. While not imposing any limitations themselves, because Virsto vDisks effectively impersonate native VHDs, their size is limited by the native VHD capacity constraints. Virsto welcomes the introduction of VHDX, as this also increases the maximum virtual disk size we support in Hyper-V environments. When Windows 8 ships, Virsto will be supporting vDisks up to 64TB in size. The expanded storage capacity nicely complements increases in CPU and memory on a per VM basis that will allow Hyper-V to host larger, higher performance applications. With Virsto’s unique ability to provide high performance, thin-provisioned, fully cluster-aware storage, Virsto customers will be able to even better support larger, more mission-critical applications with smaller, more cost-effective storage footprints.

ODX: Renewed Invitation to 3rd Party Array Vendors

ODX is somewhat analogous to the VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) concept, allowing certain tasks to be offloaded to storage array hardware to improve performance and/or lower host CPU utilization. But ODX is just an ioctl – the devil’s in the details of implementation, and that falls to storage array vendors and how they implement various features. It’s telling that third party SCSI copy has been around for quite a while, but has never really caught on. Still, we’re rooting for this to take off on Hyper-V because, depending on what the back end storage implementations look like, it could be very interesting to us for two reasons.

First, it may allow us to offload Virsto vLog flushing to an external array, improving the performance of the entire Virsto virtual storage system by enabling higher performance log draining with fewer vSpace spindles. We already generally lower the overall CPU utilization when we’re installed compared to the initial baseline. But this could potentially make it even better.

And second, it’s potentially very interesting for use cases where Virsto customers may want to move data between storage tiers. Today, Virsto supports up to 4 storage tiers. In the next major release of Virsto for Hyper-V, scheduled for 2H12, we will be introducing what we call “dynamic tiering”. This will allow customers to transparently move storage either between tiers or between physical arrays (think impact-less array upgrades) while VMs continue to run, in much the same way that VMware’s Storage vMotion does today. Particularly in cases where you are actually moving data (e.g. array upgrades), the ability to offload that to external arrays bodes well for both performance and host CPU utilization.

De-duplication

Content-based deduplication is a popular topic these days, but it also has the reputation for being a resource hog. Microsoft hasn’t mentioned much about any implementation details of this upcoming dedupe technology (is it file-based? Volume-based? In-line or post process? Where do the cycles come from to perform dedupe operations? etc.) but my guess is that it will be an optional feature that customers can turn on or off. In virtual environments where much of the redundancy is because one or a small number of VMs have been cloned over and over again, Virsto’s approach to data sharing provides a very efficient way to address the issue. And it will be able to co-exist on a single host with any VMs using this new Microsoft feature, giving customers expanded options.

NAS and Hyper-V: Yep, it's in there.

Until now, there really hasn’t been a viable NAS option on Hyper-V. Windows 8 introduces support for SMB, which will allow VHDs to be hosted on shares for the first time. Windows VSS, Microsoft’s snapshot API, has historically operated at the LUN level. In virtual environments, it is much more efficient to perform certain storage operations like snapshots, failover, and replication at the VHD rather than the LUN level. Doing so can save on storage capacity consumption, time, and network bandwidth. With the introduction of SMB, VSS can now operate at the share level as well. If VHDs are hosted on shares, you can potentially do snapshots, failover, and replication with increased granularity and hence, more efficiently.

Virsto has supported the VHD level of granularity for block-based storage for years, providing these increased efficiencies while still allowing customers to enjoy the benefits of block-based storage. That said, we’d still like to see Microsoft make the ability to perform VHD-level storage operations a core part of the VSS infrastructure. That’s an enhancement that would help everyone, and we would readily take advantage of it.

Resilient File System

In ResFS, Microsoft has made reference to a new feature called “storage spaces”. By letting administrators configure storage into separate virtual pools, this enhancement to the storage interface (which until Windows 8 has been through VDS) should enable larger, more scalable, and more easily managed storage configurations. Virsto welcomes this as well, and will reap the benefits of them while continuing to provide added value in the areas of performance, storage capacity consumption, and storage density/cost savings.

CSVs Benefit Too

Finally, I see they’ve also made some CSV enhancements. VSS backup performance for CSVs has been a challenge in the past due to the performance slowdowns often associated with re-directed I/O mode. In Windows 8, it looks like they’ve made some modifications to how copy on write is handled during VSS operations so that updates to a snapshot during the backup process no longer force that VHD into re-directed I/O mode. These changes do not appear to apply to runtime I/O to dynamic and differencing VHDs, just VSS operations, so Virsto will continue to provide significant value when customers require high performance, thin provisioned storage. It looks like they will also improve the scalability of backup operations by supporting concurrent backup of all VMs within a single CSV. Both of these enhancements are welcome additions needed for enterprise deployments. Virsto will still co-exist with CSVs, providing the same high runtime performance, rapid provisioning, and space-efficiency for clustered storage as we have in the past.

The bottom line here is that Windows 8 includes a lot of storage enhancements that Virsto can leverage transparently to make for better configurations, while not challenging any of Virsto’s unique differentiators that Hyper-V customers have found so compelling.

And The Oscar Goes To…

Eric Burgener — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:37:11 +0000

It’s all fine and dandy that Hollywood awards Oscars to those that work out of the limelight in Tinseltown, but there are a lot of unsung heroes who deserve an Oscar probably more than the guy who won for best original song for the recent Muppets movie. How would you like to hear this: “And the Oscar for best storage administrator performance from a virtual administrator who has had no formal storage training goes to…YOU!”

As virtual computing continues to penetrate mainstream computing, it’s becoming a fact of life, particularly in smaller organizations: virtual administrators are taking on more storage management tasks. It’s not enough that you have to know how to configure multiple VMs on a single host to meet performance requirements, find the perfect balance between security and accessibility for your users, troubleshoot intermittent data corruption problems on your file system, and set up availability clustering to meet stringent recovery time objectives, but you also now have to know how to create relevant RAID configurations, format and mount volumes, and configure and tune tiered storage configurations to meet competing cost and performance requirements. And let me tell you, that’s a LOT harder than writing some Muppet song.

If you’re a larger enterprise, you may still have separate server and storage administration groups, but even in those organizations, everyday tasks like spinning new servers or desktops up and down have storage implications. Having to get storage administrators involved every time that happens increases the time required to respond to user requests and, frankly, pulls storage administrators away from more critical storage tasks that they really DO need to be involved in.

When you spin up a new VM, you generally walk through a series of steps to define a set of characteristics for a virtual disk that you will ultimately mount on that VM. Creating these virtual disks can take time, particularly when you want a high performance one. When you spin down a VM, its storage is released and needs to be reclaimed to a storage pool from which all VM storage is allocated. Vendors like Virsto are simplifying these processes in a way that automatically and almost instantly creates high performance, space-efficient, cluster-aware storage when you’re creating VMs, and transparently handles all the storage reclamation steps, returning that storage to a Virsto-managed pool, when you delete VMs. The intent here is to make common storage provisioning and de-provisioning tasks “no-brainers” so that even a muppet could do it, while giving up nothing in the areas of performance, space-efficiency, cluster-awareness, and speed of provisioning.

To do this right, you want to preserve the native VM provisioning and de-provisioning workflows in popular hypervisors like VMware and Hyper-V, handling this storage stuff pretty transparently in the background. That’s why Virsto’s storage hypervisor is basically just a software plug-in to the major server hypervisor products, preserving the familiar workflows that virtual administrators already know how to use while delivering storage that is optimized for virtual computing environments.

Sure, if you want to change the queue depth on that Emulex or Qlogic HBA in host 7, you still probably want to get the storage administrator involved. But storage hypervisors like Virsto handle the daily storage provisioning and de-provisioning tasks with aplomb, improving your responsiveness while freeing up the storage administrator from routine tasks. And interestingly, with its log-based architecture, Virsto delivers the absolute maximum write performance that your storage is capable of running flat out in 100% sequential mode ALL THE TIME, regardless of what it is. That means that you don’t have to spend much time tuning your storage for performance as your environment grows – that’s handled ONCE when Virsto is first installed - and you always get predictably high performance across operations like adding new VMs, live migration and failover. That frees up even more time on the part of storage administrators, all the while guaranteeing high performance.

OK, those are some pretty bold comments, but we can back them up. If you’d like to understand the technical aspects of why they are true, you can download one of our product white papers off the Virsto website.

Virsto may not ensure that you get your own gold statue, but it will certainly improve your storage performance – by up to 10x - and reduce the amount of storage you need to meet performance requirements – by up to 90% - increasing your server or desktop density per host and lowering overall storage costs. It will lower your CPU utilization by up to 50% and reduce storage latencies by up to 25%. And it will do this ALL AT THE SAME TIME and with your existing storage. Meanwhile, we’ll talk to the academy and see if we can get them to declare a new category for 2013.

An Affair To Remember

Eric Burgener — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:59:50 +0000

It’s Tuesday, February 14, Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air. When you think about the “great couples of the ages” – Marc Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Bogie and Bacall, etc – would you ever place your relationship with your hypervisor in that group? Besides being an economic stimulus package for florists, Valentine’s Day does give us the opportunity at least once a year to think more deeply about our relationships.

Maybe you don’t think you have a “relationship” with your hypervisor. But think about this – you probably spend at least 4 hours a day, and maybe as many as 12, working closely with it, some days you curse it, and some days you thank your lucky stars for it, sometimes even after a full day you still contact it from afar (remote login) because 12 hours just wasn’t enough, and you probably can’t go on vacation without staying in touch with it. You’ve may even have had to leave a romantic dinner or two with a real person just to touch base with it when it got out of sorts. Like it or not, you two have a relationship.

Well, today is a day to reflect on the good in that relationship. Your hypervisor has probably made your administrative life a lot easier, letting you manage a lot of tasks centrally that you used to have to travel to address. You can be much more responsive to the needs of the business, something which bodes well for your relationship with your boss. But in administration just as in life, there is no free lunch. And the cost of the joy your hypervisor brings you has often been paid in storage dollars.

Real relationships require a whole host of ancillary services that help you keep that spark alive with your significant other – Hallmark, FTD, Godiva, high end restaurants, Victoria’s Secret, monster truck shows (hey, that’s why there’s vanilla AND chocolate!), cruises, etc. – and now, there’s one to help keep you and your hypervisor on the road to eternal bliss: Virsto.

What could be more romantic than giving you up to 10x more performance out of your existing storage without buying any extra hardware? Provisioning high performance storage in seconds? You like thin? We’ll give you thin provisioning AND high performance for your storage. We package everything up into a storage object that looks exactly like your native hypervisor’s virtual disk, so it fits right into those familiar and comfortable management routines you already share with your hypervisor but gives you new capabilities to help keep your relationship fresh. And we’ll give you all this using your existing storage, whatever it is. This is a romantic interlude you can share with your favorite hypervisor (or two, since we support BOTH vSphere and Hyper-V) without breaking the bank. It’s the magic of pure software, and it puts the Shane company’s options to shame.

Virsto will address your storage performance issues, regardless of whether you’ve got a virtual server or a virtual desktop infrastructure environment, and we’ll lower the cost to keep your relationship going – you’ll need a lot less storage to meet your performance requirements. It’s like buying a single rose but getting the full blown dozen long stems, baby’s breath and all.

OK, so maybe adding Virsto to your virtual environment won’t inspire you to write the sequel to Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, but it will help you to work through that nagging hypervisor relationship issue so many of us experience – “but honey, your storage is just so darn EXPENSIVE!” – without having to bring in a counselor. And who knows, it may get you to see Khayyam’s most famous quatrain in a new light (with appropriate nods to Fitzgerald):

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

Lightning, thunder and turbines: Oh my

Mark Davis — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:00:56 +0000

All of the talk of lightning, thunder and turbines this week has evoked a stark image of a jet plane hitting stormy weather. It’s an apt metaphor for what IT is facing with storage in virtualized environments. CIOs we speak with confirm that storage budgets have been hit with a force 5 hurricane due to the widespread adoption of server virtualization. One thing’s for sure: neither PCIe SSD cards nor SSD storage appliances will provide shelter for buffeted storage budgets.

EMC’s VFCache and the more established Fusion IO certainly can support more I/O, and that’s a good thing for virtual machine workloads. These approaches validate what we’ve been saying for a long time at Virsto: that getting closer to the source of the problem (virtualized workloads in the server) can yield superior results than overprovisioning hardware (solid state and otherwise) in an external disk array. Clearly, this is where storage architectures need to move.

One could deal with VM performance challenges only with specialized physical cards that install in the server, physical appliances stuffed with SSD to replace the array, or caching approaches that rely heavily on SSD. Nothing wrong with cool hardware, and at Virsto we’re huge fans of SSD. But data center architects have to be careful not to perpetuate a very nasty habit: throwing excessive hardware at problems to overcome weaknesses in software architecture. Over the years, we’ve gotten far too comfortable with overprovisioning storage arrays. Please, for the good of all humankind, let’s not do the same things with server-side storage, ok?

A more holistic approach already exists for IT to bring server and storage virtualization into equilibrium: It’s called a storage hypervisor.

We at Virsto happen to build what many think is the best one in the business.

Yeah, performance matters. But there’s more to it than only performance.

Yes, one of the fundamental challenges caused by server virtualization is highly random I/O, and yes, flash based SSDs can be good tools to solve one of the VM I/O problems. (Although, as people in the know will tell you, flash is not inherently very good at small block random writes, which is what server hypervisors tend to generate gobs of, especially in use cases like VDI.) However, a brute force approach to solving just the performance aspect of the VM I/O conundrum can be just another form of overprovisioning (that is, overspending on) storage hardware.

The Virsto approach to the broad set of VM I/O problems is holistic. Yes, we deal with performance issues. Just last week a customer in Europe bought our software because we made their hardware do I/O 44X faster. And no, that is not a typo. Adding software, the Virsto storage hypervisor, to this customer’s existing hardware made it go 44 times, or 4400 percent, faster. When we say we can relieve you of the burden of over-spending on storage hardware – on both the server and array ends of the cable – we really mean it.

We made their hardware do I/O 44X faster.

But there is more to the VM (and cloud) I/O problem than just random I/O performance. That’s why Virsto has a more holistic view.

There is also the issue of massively wasted terabytes. I hate to be the one to tell you (let alone your CFO), but perhaps 80% of the physical terabytes you buy for VM storage are not really needed. And let’s not forget the billions of dollars in operating expense wasted by slow and complex VM provisioning. I could go on. There are plenty of other VM I/O problems that SSD, whether server-side or array-side, aren’t built to fix.

About, oh, ten years ago, we all could have kept dealing with our server problems by throwing expensive and proprietary hardware at them. But some pretty clever folks in Palo Alto, Cambridge, Redmond, and around the globe came up with a better idea. It was called a server hypervisor, and the concept changed the world in a fundamental way.

Now comes a team of people in Sunnyvale and Melbourne who have spent a couple years building a fundamentally different and architecturally elegant way to deal with the totality of VM I/O problems: the Virsto storage hypervisor. It boosts performance, with or without SSD, sure. But there’s a whole lot more.

SSD alone will not solve all the fundamental challenge of storage in virtualized environments. The emergence of the storage hypervisor will bring the economics of storage back into line. Just in time for things to get truly cloudy and stormy.