Nutanix Puts the I in VDI
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Nutanix Puts the I in VDI
- 1. Nutanix Puts the I in VDI Presenter Name, Title @Twitter
- 2. 2 Agenda Image best practices GPU Sizing Benefits of Nutanix Q & ACitrix MCS on AHV
- 3. 3 Agenda Image best practices GPU Sizing Benefits of Nutanix Q & ACitrix MCS on AHV
- 4. 4 Optimizing your desktop What? What to use? Results? VMware OS optimization fling 18-20% higher density Bpanalyzer 20-22% higher density Use best practice guides Mileage may vary
- 5. 5 Optimizing your desktop Choose your deployment method wisely – MCS/PVS & Linked/Full Clones Antivirus – Full scan on sealing your image Windows Update – Disable when possible Application distribution – Application virtualization/layering
- 6. 6 Agenda Image best practices GPU Sizing Benefits of Nutanix Q & ACitrix MCS on AHV
- 7. 7 Get your sizing done: the right way! Assessments: LWL Stratusphere/Dell DPACK If all fails: Go for task, knowledge, power users. Test drive before making capital investment decision User acceptance will increase if there’s basic knowledge POC acts as a blueprint accelerator and helps to avoid changes in scope Gaps in the architecture will be identified Mitigate investment risks Knowledge transfer effect Reduce implementation time & cost Mitigate deployment risks P O C
- 8. 8 How to Size Compute for Your Environment (((Cores x Sockets) x hyperthreading ratio) – CVM CPU) x Overcommit Ratio Hyperthreading = 1.3 CVM cores = 8 Overcommit Ratio = TBD -20% for 2vCPU desktops +20% for running on Haswell +15% for running on Broadwell
- 9. 9 Turn on Compression, Dedupe & Erasure Coding What’s your Problem? Capacity or Performance Full Clones: Dedupe Everything Else: Compression Erasure Coding: Not for VDI Courtesy of Designbrews.com
- 10. 10 Keep in mind Win 7 Win 10
- 12. 12 Agenda Image best practices GPU Sizing Benefits of Nutanix Q & ACitrix MCS on AHV
- 13. 13 Using Linked Clone + unoptimized Distributed Filesystem Master vDisk Distributed datastore Clone… Host local storage Diff I D Diff I D Snapshot Host local storage Diff I D Diff I D Host local storage Diff I D Diff I D 110011010101110000101011110110101011000010111110101010101011101010101000111010101011110101001110101101010111000101 0101010101011 Diff I D Diff I D Diff I D Diff I D Constant reads over the network
- 14. 14 Optimized distributed storage with Shadow Clones Master vDisk Clone… Host local storage Diff I D Diff I D Snapshot Host local storage Diff I D Diff I D Host local storage Diff I D Diff I D 110011010101110000101011110110101011000010111110101010101011101010101000111010101011110101001110101101010111000101 0101010101011 Once 2 remote (CVM) connections are detected the master vdisk is cached locally on each host, block by block on read. Shadow Clone Shadow Clone Block copy on remote read Distributed datastore
- 15. 15 0 200 400 600 800 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 TimetobootallMVs Total VMs booting Linked Clone Boot Time (7 Node Cluster) Shadow Clones Less is better Improving User Experience using Distributed Caching with Shadow Clones • Distributed caching of vDisks using local SSDs • Great for XenDesktop MCS and other multi reader scenarios • As much as 50% reduction in boot time
- 16. 16 Agenda Image best practices GPU Sizing Benefits of Nutanix Q & ACitrix MCS on AHV
- 17. 17 Legacy Graphical Users are Difficult to Support Need for high Spec PC’s: CPU Memory Disk IO GPU Screen sizes Expensive licenses Data distribution & Protection of IP Tough to mobilize Expensive laptops & the risk of theft
- 18. 18 GPUs help Solve the Transformation Problem Centralizing physical resources and redistribute with better efficiency Centralizing apps and data Making the most demanding users mobile while maintaining end user experience
- 19. 19 Nutanix Solves the Scalability Problem 19 Linear scale-out cluster design Scale node by node Making the storage infrastructure invisible, lowering administrative burden and costs Delivering high performance for the entire virtual desktop, ensuring great end-user experience
- 20. 20 Graphics Options in Virtualization
- 21. 21 Nutanix supports latest gen NVIDIA GPUs 21
- 22. 22 Nutanix Models Supporting NVIDIA GRID 2.0 Technology
- 23. 23 Agenda Image best practices GPU Sizing Benefits of Nutanix Q & ACitrix MCS on AHV
- 24. 24 Machine Creation Services mechanics • Fully integrated in Citrix Studio, no separate infrastructure • MCS is a VM creation framework with a translator • Method differ depending on the hypervisor used • MCS fully controls the creation of VM’s and it’s associated disks on the hypervisor platforms
- 25. 25 MCS high level vdisk architecture Virtual Machine Diff disk Root vDisk Datastore Virtual Machine Virtual Machine ID disk Diff disk ID disk Diff disk ID disk Master VM snapshots flattened copy… …to every configured datastore Persistent identity 16MB Space reclaimed at every reboot One copy of the vdisk shared by all VM’s
- 26. 26 MCS architecture with Nutanix AHV Citrix Studio Citrix Services Provisioning SDK PS Cmdlets MCS–AHV interface Nutanix AHV plugin needs to be installed on all XD controllers REST API Services: Brokering Host Machine Creation AD Identity snapshot Cloning ID Power Management & Provisioning XenDesktop Controller
- 27. 27 MCS File layouts on Nutanix AHV
- 28. 28 MCS File layouts on Nutanix AHV
- 29. 29 Agenda Image best practices GPU Sizing Benefits of Nutanix Q & ACitrix MCS on AHV
- 30. 30 Like What You Just Heard… There’s More! READ Citrix XenDesktop on Nutanix AHV – CVS Nutanix Ebook: Definitive Guide to VDI USE Nutanix Sizer: Effectively Size your Target Environment !
- 31. Thank You
Editor's Notes
- Dedupe only for Full clones 110 Desktops – 36 GB for user data Compression 2.5 – 4.0 X savings
- A great way to solve this is to go the software defined route and opt for distributed filesystem. While this still leverages local storage (SSD’s preferably so it can’t bottleneck like a SAN would), it is not managed as local storage. The hypervisor just sees a single datastore, which also means you only need to configure it only once in XenDesktop. Net benefit of this is that it also just requires just a single copy to be made on image roll out.. There however is a problem with this if you used just a typical run of the mill distributed filesystem, that has no techniques to truly localize data) since it will not be optimized for running a multi-reader scenario. What will happen is that when the golden master is created, this process will write the vdisk to the storage of the host that performs the copy. While the VM’s local to that host will read the master vdisk locally, the other hosts in the cluster will access the vdisk over the network. This could become a bottleneck when enough VM’s start to read from the master. Even though the vDisk is probably replicated to other hosts , this is only done to assure data availability in case of a host failure. It will not distribute the disk load balancing pursposes. At most, each host might have a small cache to try to avoid some of the read traffic, but these caches are not optimized for multireader scenario’s (only work for 1 VM reading its own disk) or the caches are simply just too small to house the vdisk in the first place.
- Nutanix solves this problem ahead of time by way of Shadow Cloning. As soon as we detect that multiple VM’s (2 or more remote readers) pull data from the vdisk, we mark the main vdisk as immutable which allows for distributed caching of the entire disk. This is done on reads, block by block. This way each VM will automatically work with localized data. This not only relieves the network for reads (writes are local anyway), but it also seriously improves performance. This technology is enabled by default and requires no configuration whatsoever.
- Shadow clones offer distributed caching of vDisks or VM data that is in a multi-reader scenarios Up to 50% performance optimization during VDI boot-storms and other multi reader scenario’s.
- Machine Creation Services mechanics: MCS is fully integrated into Citrix Studio and does not require a separate installer or configuration. It’s there on each XenDesktop Controller. MCS itself is a VM creation framework that can be learned to understand different hypervisors. No code is actually placed on the hypervisor. The method used to provision VMs and link disks to it, differs per hypervisor, but MCS fully controls the creation of the VM’s and fires of the commands to the hypervisor’s management platform or API’s.
- The last hypervisor we look at (and most certainly not the least!) , is the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor. AHV has been around for a while but we’ve only really started calling it AHV since june last year when we released a new version of it at Nutanix .Next in Miami (which will be held in Vegas in 2 weeks time btw). We’re proud to announce full GUI based support for AHV in XenDesktop, which includes the use of Machine Creation Services. How does it work? First of all you need XenDesktop 7.9, which has the latest version of the Provisioing SDK installed on it. Together with the Nutanix AHV plugin you install on every controller, you can now have Studio talk natively to Acropolis. Nutatix clusters are automatically highly available because of the distributed architecture, so you only need to point Studio to the Nutanix cluster IP address and you’re done. It works the same way from that point on, and you create catalogs based on snapshots, which will then lead to provisioned VM’s with ID disks and writecaches.
- Under water we do a couple of things differently than the previsou 3 hypervisors. We use a full clone approach, with copy on write functionality. Each VM is linked to the master image, but will show up as the full vdisk, also the 16 MB ID disk is beeing attached. These vDisks are thin provisioned, and while they show a usage of 10 GB in the above example, the actual data usage will be much lower, since we deduplicate and compress data on the storage level. After every restart of the VM, the writecache disk is reset.
- Here you see the actual logical files when looked at the datastore through a WinSCP client, with the writecache disks at the top, and the ID disks at the bottom.