Tintri's VDI flash disk mix: The kit that booted 1,000 virtual desktops
Legion of clones spawned in just 9 seconds each
Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime
VMWorld Barcelona Tintri and VMware showed the virtualisation players how it's done at VMWorld today when they tested a Tintri hybrid storage array booting 1,000 virtual desktops in two-and-a-half hours – nine seconds per desktop.
Tintri hybrid flash and disk drive arrays are purpose-designed to support virtual server operations.
The test set up used a Dell R610 ESXi management server, four Dell R720 ESXi hosts for virtual desktops, host, each with two Xeon E5-2690 processors, Windows 7 64bit images, VMware VIEW, Dell Force 10 switches, a Tintri T540 data store, and VMware VIEW Planner v2.1.
One thousand linked clones were fully deployed in 2.5 hours, 150 minutes, meaning 9 seconds per clone.
Speaking at VMWorld Barcelona, Tintri marketing veep Geoff Stedman said the all-in system cost came in at under $200/virtual desktop – he reckons that's a new baseline. Tintri CEO Kieran Harty said that the users got performance on their virtual desktops equivalent to that of an all-flash notebook, like a MacBook Air; superior to the average performance of a disk-driven PC.
Stedman added: "We're achieving the performance of an all-flash array at one third of the price." The first VM user was logged in eight minutes after the T540 was wheeled into the test lab.
Stedman said Tintri now had around 150 customers, and that two of them had more than 900 VMs supported and several are at the 500+ VM level: "So utilisation is going up."
All-flash array start-ups Whiptail and Violin have revealed their systems can support thousands of virtual desktops. The VDI storage support game is moving to a performance and cost game. The big questions are: how many VMs can a storage box support; how fast can it boot them; how fast can they be once started; and what's the cost per desktop?
Tintri must be hoping its flash + disk combination provides an unbeatable price/performance advantage. ®
COMMENTS
The test was a complete provisioning, booting and application usage test for 1,000 desktops
To clarify the points raised by readers, the test was a complete provisioning, booting and application usage test for 1,000 desktops – all at “Macbook Air” performance levels, so the 150 minutes refers to the time taken for 1,000 linked clones to be fully deployed and the tests completed on a single Tintri VMstore T540 storage node.
An overview of the testing can be viewed here - http://www.tintri.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Reexamining-VDI-Conventions-121008.pdf
Disclosure: I am VP of global marketing at Tintri and quoted within the article
I think they actually mean 'provisioned' not 'booted' in 150mins.
Boot time or setup time?
I really hope they mean 2.5 hours to create the thousand instances - a 2.5 hour boot time would be virtually worthless! Equally, spreading the boot times over 2.5 hours isn't much use for VDI; surely most real VDIs would be powering up very close to the 9am mark, very few earlier than 8:30 or later than 9:30.
Having said that, I recall Novell bragging about having built a big (100k user?) authentication setup, back in the 90s. I was horrified by the two-minute login times they quoted. Guess what we ended up having rolled out to us. (Result: workflow consisting of 'enter username & password, go make coffee, come back to logged in desktop you hope'.) Quite why it couldn't process logins at a more adequate pace, I don't know.
Merely booting a thousand machines should entail something of the order of a terabyte of network traffic; saturating a single 10GE link, that should be of the order of 20 minutes, not 2.5 hours (for a single cloned OS image, you should have about 1 Gb of 'hot' data, being served from RAM for all but the first boot). Now, show it having all the users starting to come in at 8:50 and being booted and ready to go by 9:10 I'll be more impressed - but spread it out over enough hours, you could boot them all from one Mac Mini with some SATA drives, it just won't be fast enough to be useful!
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