News

posted on 22 July 2008 10:16

3PAR has just announced a way of provisioning thousands of PCs from an ultra-skinny 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop product using VMware's VDI.

Organisations with hundreds and thousands of PCs thinking about moving to VMware's virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) will need to keep the virtual PC desktop files on a storage resource. Whenever a PC is started up its virtual desktop image is provisioned across the network from the central storage resource. Assume a 1GB PC virtual desktop file, 5,000 PCS in the estate, and you need a 5TB storage resource.

You could de-dupe the virtual desktop files which would reclaim lots of space from these highly redundant files but needs a huge amount of processing power. Or, you could start out with a master file and clone or snapshot it, which is what 3PAR is offering with its Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI. Thin Copy, using 3PAR's existing Virtual Copy technology, only copies the unique data for each new virtual desktop and uses a pointer reference structure for the rest of the data, meaning it saves up to 90 percent of the space needed originally.

3PAR says its Thin Copy Desktop offers fast desktop booting, automated provisioning, and rapid desktop recovery. It has also enhanced Virtual Copy with the ability to support up to 128 read/writable snapshots per base volume.

Thin desktop snapshots are automatically created from “golden desktop” images and exported to the VMware ESX hypervisor, which then creates a new virtual desktop from each snapshot. The new virtual desktops are ready in seconds without manual provisioning or time-consuming, host-based cloning. The process of creating virtual desktops from a golden image can be simply and rapidly repeated to create thousands of virtual desktops that together consume only a fraction of the bandwidth and storage resources that would otherwise be required with traditional storage.

The company claims that, even when simultaneously booted, these virtual desktops consume minimal additional bandwidth and storage resources than the golden image used to create them. In fact it says booting hundreds of desktops from a single VMware ESX cluster can be faster than it is for an individual desktop. Thin Copy Desktop, because it uses Virtual Copy snapshots, can share the same cache pages for common data within a snapshot tree. In the case of booting, most of the data is common among the virtual desktop boot images, requiring only a single copy in cache to potentially support hundreds of booting clients. This approach is designed to eliminate the performance impact common with traditional SAN and NAS devices, which typically page to disk for each booting client.

David Scott, 3PAR's president and CEO, said: “With 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI, organisations can now consider both server consolidation and centralised desktop management served from a single resilient utility storage platform.”

In effect, VDI is helping to create thin PCS which don't need so much local disk storage. That capacity migrates back to the data center where 3PAR's technology can radically reduce the amount of storage capacity needed.

Central management with golden copies means that, with a PC operating sytem or application update, only the golden copy needs updating and then the Thin Copy procedure automatically ripples the changes throughout the PC virtual desktop estate it looks after. Administrators also have the ability to recover virtual desktop images in just seconds from granular recovery points. With the ability to schedule snapshots to complete automatically on a regular basis, recovery of virtual desktops for users who accidentally delete or corrupt data is fast too.

The product supports virtual desktops mounted via virtual machine file system (VMFS) and raw device mapping (RDM). In both cases, one-to-one relationships are maintained between the virtual desktop and the underlying snapshots to give administrators precise insight into I/O and capacity utilisation for each virtual desktop. No extra tools are required to monitor these usage statistics and visibility is even preserved while rebalancing virtual desktops using VVMotion's live migration capability. In addition, an RDM volume can be mounted to either virtual or physical hosts.

^{[Martin Edwards, news writer.]}