Minnesota State Colleges & Universities Tintri Deployment Story Presenter: Matt Heldstab Enterprise Systems Engineer Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System Office For more information: Tintri: http://bit.ly/1KK7JcK Tintri Events: http://bit.ly/1ycjdlT

1. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system is an Equal Opportunity employer and educator.
Tintricity on-the-road
Minnesota State Colleges & Universities
Tintri Deployment Story
Matt Heldstab
Enterprise Systems Engineer
Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System Office
@mattheldstab on Twitter – matt.heldstab@so.mnscu.edu

2. Slide 2
Who am I?
• 18 years in technology – 14 years in State Gov. & Education
• Own MnSCU’s Virtual Server and Desktop Infrastructure
• More Than VDI
• Netscaler Load Balancing, Linux Administrator, Windows Administrator, MS
Exchange, Active Directory, Storage, Citrix XenApp, Physical Compute
Infrastructure)
• VCP5 in Datacenter Virtualization
• Community Evangelist
• Eau Claire, WI VMware User Group (VMUG) Leader in 2015
• VMware Evangelist, Speaker, Amateur Blogger at www.tcwd.net/vblog

3. Slide 3
Who is MnSCU?
#1 - Largest provider of higher
Education in MN
#5 – Fifth largest system of colleges &
universities in US
Serve 435,000 students annually in 47
different MN communities
Designed to serve diverse needs
31 institutions
24 technical & community colleges
7 state universities)
54 campuses

4. Slide 4
MnSCU’s Virtualization Profile
• 3 Data centers - Minneapolis, St. Paul & Woodbury
• VMware ESX since 3.0 (circa 2006)
• VMware View since 3.0 (circa 2009)
• Approximately 200 Virtual Desktops
• System Office - 99% virtualized (15 ESXi Hosts)
• Enterprise systems - 50% virtualized (45 ESXi Hosts)

5. Slide 5
History of VDI at the MnSCU System Office
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
VDI 1.0 VDI 2.0
VDI 2.5
VDI 3.0 VDI 4.0 VDI 5.0
• View 3.0
• HP EVA 4000
• 4 shelves
• 56 disks
• View 4.0
• HP Lefthand P4500
• 8 Shelves
• 96 disks
• Endpoint
Change
• PCoIP
• View 4.6
• Increased
Availability
• View 5.3
• Persona
Management
• Tintri Arrives
• VDI Next
• Horizon
DaaS on
Premise
2015

6. Slide 6
Current Use Cases
MnSCU Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
• Primary User Computing Option
• Secure Remote Access
• Shared workstations (Reception areas)
• ERP System Software Developers
• Secure environment with standardized tool set
• Browser Testing (IE8, 9, 10, 11)
• Dedicated Training Labs
• Mobile Training Labs
• Campus Computing Environment
• Secure Online Banking
• Accountability Framework Dashboard Portal

7. Slide 7

8. Slide 8
Features that attracted the MnSCU System
Office to Tintri
• Ease of Management
• VM-awareness and Storage QoS
• Ability to protect Virtual Machines at the VM level
• Backing up Persistent Disks and Parent VMs is a snap
• Quick Cloning
• Extremely fast recomposing of desktop pools (Linked Clones or Full Clones)
• Inline de-duplication and compression
• Similar desktop pool replica disks don’t take up as much space
• Least frequently accessed block eviction
• When a block is read once, it does not promote to flash right away
• Prevents stale file backups from negatively impacting performance
• No complicated exception configurations needed
• Simplified load testing using Tingle Appliance
• Granular performance diagnosis capabilities
• If a VM is having performance issues, a plethora of information is easy to find

9. Slide 9
Storage Field Day – November 9th, 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi6pZEvRk4c#t=584

10. Slide 10
Easy to identify issues on a per-VM basis

11. Slide 11

12. Slide 12

13. Slide 13

14. Slide 14
Other storage vendors we looked at in 2013
• NetApp
• Controller CPU was a bottleneck
• Larger systems were too expensive
• HP (3PAR and Lefthand)
• Flash Tier was too expensive
• Nimble
• SSDs are not a capacity tier (cache only)
• All writes written to both SSD and HDD
• Any read results in the block being copied to SSD cache even if it only
going to happen once (backups)
• All
• Much more complicated to install and manage
• Difficult to diagnose issues due to no VM-awareness

15. Slide 15
VDI - Lessons Learned
• Storage, Storage, Storage
• Understand your bottlenecks and I/O capacity
• Isolate pilot environment as much as you can
• An improperly planned VDI can and will affect everything your storage touches
• Monitor the impact of all VMware Infrastructure activities and VDI on your storage
or isolate VDI to it’s own spindles.
• Use Linked Clones on multiple LUNs to minimize impact
• Prepare to address Antivirus and Boot Storm Issues
• Buying a new SAN? Look for VAAI-compatible storage
• Newest versions of VMware software have drastic performance gains
• Licensing
• Use KMS licensing for Windows and Productivity Suite (Office)
• Understand VDA licensing and where you might need it
• Take extra time developing your gold image
• Use the VMware VDI Optimization Guide http://bit.ly/axl9FJ

16. Slide 16
…but that was a couple of years ago

17. Slide 17
Tintri VMstore - What we found after
implementation
• 99-100% of all reads and writes served out of SSD
• “Storage QoS” – VMs are allocated and guaranteed
performance resources
• Able to address I/O blender effect by sorting out traffic
on
a per-VM basis
• NFS VAAI primitives allow for rapid provisioning /
cloning
• Per-VM storage performance monitoring
• Allowed us to defer our vShield Endpoint project
(Hypervisor-offloaded AV)

18. Slide 18
Performance Numbers

19. Slide 19
Performance Numbers

20. Slide 20
• Desktops-as-a-Service for campuses
• 110 endpoint pilot in planning
• Implemented in conjunction with
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
• Leveraging Horizon DaaS on Premises
• Requires Full Clone Desktops
VDI Next – Horizon 6 and Horizon
DaaS

21. Slide 21
Questions??