Pure Storage Reference Architecture

for VMware® View™

Overview
This document describes a reference architecture for deploying virtual desktops on the Pure Storage
FlashArray using VMware® View™ 5.0, View Composer 2.7, vSphere 5.1 hypervisor and Microsoft
Windows 7. Pure Storage has validated the reference architecture with VMware’s View Planner 2.1
workload in its lab – this document presents performance and scalability testing results and offers
implementation guidance.

Goals and Objectives

The goal of this document is to showcase the ease of deploying a large number of virtual desktops on
the Pure Storage FlashArray. We will demonstrate the scalability of VMware View based Windows 7
desktops on the FlashArray by deploying 1,000 virtual desktops in both linked clone and full clone
persistent desktop configurations and running the VMware View Planner workload to simulate real
user interaction and experience in a VDI workload. In addition, we highlight the benefits of the Pure
Storage FlashArray including inline data reduction and low latency and show how all-flash storage can
dramatically improve both the end-user and administrative experience of VDI compared to traditional
disk-based storage.

Audience
The target audience for this document includes storage and virtualization administrators, consulting
data center architects, field engineers, and desktop specialists who want to implement VMware View
based virtual desktops on the FlashArray. A working knowledge of VMware vSphere, VMware View,
server, storage, network and data center design is assumed but is not a prerequisite to read this
document.
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Summary of Findings
• We deployed 1,000 VMware View based linked clone Windows 7 desktops and ran a realistic
load generator with VMware View Planner that simulated 1,000 users performing common
computing tasks, resulting in a best-in-class score of 0.52 seconds. This score means the
majority of the applications (95% of group "A" interactive operations) had a response time of
0.52 second or less, well within the passing score of 1.5 seconds.

• We then repeated the test using 1,000 persistent full-clone desktops, achieving the same View
Planner score and showing that users can confidently use any combination of linked clone or
full clone persistent desktops on the FlashArray – both perform the same.

• Throughout the testing the FlashArray delivered up to 50,000 IOPS and maintained latency
under 1.1ms, demonstrating the FlashArray’s consistent latency and ability to deliver the best
all-flash VDI end-user experience at all times. The FlashArray delivers a better desktop
experience for end-users than dedicated laptops with SSDs, and doesn’t risk the end-user
experience by relying on caching as hybrid flash/disk arrays do.

• In total throughout the testing we deployed more than 2,000 desktops, including both 1,000
linked clones and 1,000 persistent desktops (each of 31 GB disk size), together only consuming
about 1.1 TB of physical storage on the FlashArray. This massive data reduction (>20-to-1) is the
result of the high-performance inline data reduction (deduplication and compression) delivered
by the FlashArray, which enables using any combination of linked clones or persistent full-
clone desktops – both of which reduce to about the same amount of space on the array.

• As tested, the 11TB FlashArray FA-320 delivered best-in-class VDI performance at a cost of
$100/desktop for 2,000 desktops. Since the FlashArray was significantly under-utilized
throughout the testing on both a capacity and performance basis, the array could have
supported 1,000s more desktops, or a smaller array could have been used, either of which
would have reduced the $/desktop cost even further.

• Throughout the testing we performed common VDI administrator operations and found a
drastic reduction in time for recomposing desktops, cloning persistent desktops, (re)booting
desktops, and other day-to-day virtual desktop operations. Taken together these operational
savings deliver substantial efficiency gains for VDI administrators throughout the VDI day.

• The power footprint for the tested FA-320 FlashArray was 9 Amps (110V) which is a fraction of
any mechanical disk storage array available in the marketplace. This configuration consumed
eight rack units (8 RU) in data center space.

• This reference architecture can be treated as a 1,000 desktop building block. Customers can
add more server and infrastructure components to scale the architecture out to 1,000s of
desktops. Based on the results, we believe a single FA-320 can support up to 5,000
desktops with any mix of linked clones and/or persistent desktops.
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Introduction
The IT industry has been abuzz over the past several years promoting the idea of VDI: virtualizing and
centralizing desktops to enable IT to deliver a more secure, manageable, less costly, and ultimately
more mature end-user computing model. While the dream of pervasive deployment of virtual desktop
infrastructure has been discussed and tried for literally decades, the recent explosion of x86
virtualization, and the availability of commodity scalable server architectures with increasingly large
amounts of CPU power and centralized memory have made the promise of VDI much closer to reality.
In fact, sophisticated IT departments are finding that with the right investments in infrastructure, VDI
can indeed deliver a client computing model that is both better for the end-user (a truly mobile, multi-
device computing experience with better performance than dedicated devices) and better for the IT
staff (centralized management, consistent security and policy enforcement, resiliency through device
independence, and enablement of “bring your own device” BYOD models).

So if VDI comes with so many potential advantages, why has adoption of VDI been so slow? The
reality is that the path to achieving the VDI promise land is a difficult one, and many organizations have
abandoned their VDI initiatives outright or in partial stages of deployments. The reasons why are
many, but most failed deployments boil-down to three key issues:

• Too expensive: VDI is often positioned as a technology to reduce desktop cost, but in reality most
find that they are unable to achieve the promised ROI due to infrastructure costs. In particular,
expensive server, networking, and storage devices are often dramatically more expensive than
dedicated desktops/laptops.
• Poor end-user experience: if VDI isn’t implemented properly, the end result is slow or unavailable
desktops that can lead to user frustration and lost productivity.
• Too difficult to manage: VDI shifts the desktop administration burden from the end-users to IT
staff. While this affords many security and administrative benefits, it also means more work for
often burdened IT staff, especially if the VDI environment itself isn’t architected correctly.
More often than not, one of the chief contributors to all three of these failure modes is storage.
Traditional disk-based storage is optimized for high-capacity, modest performance, and read-heavy
workloads – the exact opposite of VDI which is write-heavy, very high performance, and low-capacity.
The result is that as performance lags, spindle after spindle of legacy disk storage has to be thrown at
VDI, causing a spike in infrastructure costs and a spike in management complexity.
In this reference architecture for virtual desktops we’re going to explore how a new, 100%-flash based
approach to VDI can help overcome the key VDI failure traps, and help deliver a VDI solution that both
end-users and IT administrators will love. We’ll start with a high level overview of the Pure Storage
FlashArray followed by the test infrastructure components that was put together for this work and dive
into the details of each component. Finally, we’ll discuss the results of the VMware View Planner load
generator and the operational benefits of using Pure Storage FlashArray for virtual desktop
deployment.

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The Pure Storage All-Flash Solution for VDI
Introducing Pure Storage
Pure storage was founded with a simple goal in mind: that 100% flash storage should be made
affordable, so that the vast majority of enterprise applications can take advantage of the potential
advances that flash memory affords. As such we designed our core product, the Pure Storage
FlashArray, from the ground-up for the unique characteristics of flash memory.

The FlashArray’s entire architecture was designed to reduce the cost of 100% flash storage, and it
combines the power of consumer-grade MLC flash memory with inline data reduction technologies
(deduplication, compression, thin provisioning) to drive the cost of 100% flash storage to be inline or
under the cost of traditional enterprise disk storage. Data reduction technologies are particularly
effective in VDI environments, typically providing >5-to-1 reduction for stateless desktops and >10-to-1
reduction for stateful desktops.

High-Performance Resiliency & Scale

Inline Data Reduction high availability
always deduped, compressed, snapshots
thin and encrypted
RAID-3D™
online expansion

Simplicity
100% MLC Flash

It’s important to note that unlike some flash appliances, the FlashArray was designed with enterprise-
class scale and resiliency in mind. That means a true active/active controller architecture, online
capacity expansion, and online non-disruptive code upgrades. The FlashArray also employs a unique
form of RAID protection, called RAID-3D™, which is designed to protect against the three failure modes
of flash: device failure, bit errors, and performance variability.

Last but not least, the FlashArray is the simplest enterprise storage that you’ll ever use. We’ve
designed from the start to remove the layers of complexity of LUN, storage virtualization, RAID, and
caching management common in traditional arrays, and have integrated management directly into
VMware vSphere’s Web Client, making management of a VDI environment seamless.

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Reference Architecture Design Principles
The guiding principles for implementing this reference architecture are:

• Create a scalable building block that can be easily replicated at any customer site using a
customer’s chosen server and networking hardware.

• Implement every infrastructure component in a VM. This ensures easy scale-out of

infrastructure components when you go from 1,000 to 5,000+ virtual desktops.

• Create a design that is resilient, even in the face of failure of any component. For example, we
include best practices to enforce multiple paths to storage, multiple NICs for connectivity, and
high availability (HA) clustering including dynamic resource scheduling (DRS) on vSphere.

• Take advantage of inline data reduction and low latency of the Pure Storage FlashArray to
push the envelope on desktops-per-server density.

• Avoid tweaks to make the results look better than a normal out-of-box environment.

Solution Overview
Figure 1 shows a topological view of the test environment for our reference architecture. The VMware
View infrastructure components were placed on a dedicated host. We tested 1,000 linked clone
desktops, 1,000 full-clone persistent desktops, and various mixtures of the two. The infrastructure,
virtual machines and desktops were all hosted on a single 11TB FlashArray FA-320 (although the
workload would have easily fit on the smallest 2.75TB FA-320 or FA-310 as well). VMware vSphere and
VMware View best practices were used in addition to the stringent requirements as mandated by the
View Planner guideline document [See reference 1].

The tested configuration included:

• One 11TB Pure Storage FlashArray (FA-320) in HA configuration, including two controllers and
two disk shelves:

— Ten x 4 TB volumes were carved out of the Pure FlashArray to host 2,000 desktops
(1,000 linked clones + 1,000 persistent desktops)

— A separate 600 GB volume was used to hold all the infrastructure components

• Eight Intel Xeon x5690 based commodity servers with 192 GB of memory running ESXi 5.1
were used to host the desktops

• One dedicated server was used to host the all of the infrastructure virtual machines:

— Active directory, DNS, and DHCP

— View Connection server

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 — Virtual Center server

— SQL server for both virtual center and View event database

— VMware View Planner 2.1 appliance

Figure 1: Test Environment overview of VMware View deployment with infrastructure components,
ESX hosts and Pure Storage FlashArray volumes.
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Reference Architecture Configuration
This section describes the configuration in brief. Later sections have detailed hardware and software
configurations.

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Figure 2: Detailed Reference Architecture Configuration

Figure 2 shows a detailed topology of the reference architecture configuration. A major goal of the
architecture is to build out a highly redundant and resilient infrastructure. Thus, we used powerful
servers with dual Fibre Channel ports connected redundantly to two SAN switches that were
connected to redundant FC target ports on the FlashArray. The servers were hosted in a vSphere HA
cluster and had redundant network connectivity.

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Hardware Configuration
Pure Storage FlashArray FA-320 configuration
The FlashArray FA-320 configuration comprised of two active/active controllers and two shelves of
5.5TB of raw flash memory for a total of 11TB of raw storage. Four Fibre Channel ports were connected
to two Cisco MDS 9148 8Gb SAN switches in a highly redundant configuration as shown in Figure 2.
Table A below describes the specifications of the FlashArray FA-320.

Component Description

Controllers Two active/active controllers which provided highly redundant SAS connectivity
(24Gb) to two shelves and were interconnected for HA via two redundant InfiniBand
connections (40Gb)

Shelves Two flash memory shelves with 22 SSD drives, 22 X 256 GB or a total raw capacity of
11TB (10.3 TiB).

External Four 8Gb Fibre Channel ports or four 10 Gb Ethernet ports per controller, total of eight
Connectivity ports for two controllers. As shown in figure 2, only four Fibre Channel ports (two FC
ports from each controller) were used for this test.

Management Two redundant 1 Gb Ethernet management ports per controller. Three management IP
Ports addresses are required to configure the array, one for each controller management
port and a third one for virtual port IP address for seamless management access.

Power Dual power supply rated at 450W per controller and 200W per storage shelf or
approximately 9 Amps of power

Space The entire FA-320 system was hosted on eight rack unit (8 RU) space (2 RU for each
controller and 2 RU for each shelf).

Table A: Pure Storage FlashArray FA-320 specifications

There was no special tweaking or tuning done on the FlashArray; we do not recommend any special
tunable variables as the system is designed to perform out of the box.

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LUN Configuration of the FlashArray
Ten thin provisioned volumes of 4 TB each were configured to host 1,000 linked clone desktops and
1,000 persistent desktops. Because the FlashArray doesn’t have any requirement for configuring RAID
groups/aggregates, it was a simple two-step task to configure Pure Storage volumes and provision to
the server. The task of provisioning ten volumes to vSphere cluster was further simplified by creating a
host group on Pure Storage FlashArray that provided a one-to-one mapping with the vSphere cluster.
For boot from SAN, Pure storage provides private volumes that can be used for boot the LUN.

A common question when provisioning storage is how many LUNs of what size should be created to
support the virtual desktop deployment. Because linked clone desktops take very little space, we
could have either put all the virtual desktops in one big LUN or spread them across several LUNs. The
FlashArray supports the VMware VAAI ATS primitive which gives you access of multiple VMDKs on a
single LUN (Note in vSphere 5.x the maximum size of a LUN is 64 TB). VAAI ATS eliminates serializing
of VMFS locks on the LUN, which used to severely limit VM scalability in previous ESX versions. See
Appendix A for more details on provisioning Pure Storage.

Since we are advocating placing the OS image, user data, persona and application data on the same
storage, we need to take in account the size of those drives when calculating the LUN size.

Consider a desktop with a 30 GB base image including applications and app data, 20GB of user data
and we need to provision “d” desktops:

• We need to provision 50 * d as the size of the LUN --or--

• One could distribute the “d” desktops across “n” LUNs with (50 * d) / n desktops on each LUN.

Regardless of the data reduction, we need to create the LUN with the correct size so that vSphere
doesn’t run out of storage capacity. Figure 4 below shows the virtual desktop deployment on Pure
Storage.

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Figure 4: OS image, applications, user data and application data hosted on Pure Storage

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Data Reduction with Pure Storage FlashArray
Storage Capacity with 1,000 Linked Clone Desktops
Figure 5 below shows 1,000 Windows 7 linked clone desktops deployed on a brand new FlashArray.
The total physical capacity used was 66.1 GB for the entire 1,000 desktops. Because linked clones only
store the differential data, we achieve a 25 to 1 data reduction. In essence, 40TB of provisioned
storage actually consumed about 66 GB of space on the flash memory.

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Figure 5: Data reduction of 1,000 Windows 7 linked clone desktops

Storage Capacity with 2,000 Linked Clone and Persistent Desktops

When we provisioned 2,000 persistent desktops (each with 31 GB disk capacity) we also experienced
a 25 to 1 data reduction; the entire 31 TB was stored on 1.19 TB of physical media. This result accounts
for the RAID-3D protection, shared data and the volume data as shown below. Note that space
reporting doesn’t include zeros that EZT (Flat) and ZT (thick) VMFS volumes.

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Figure 6: Data reduction of 2,000 desktops: 1,000 linked clones plus 1,000 full clones
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The persistent desktops had 1 GB of user data each, so for 1,000 desktops for different view Planner
user customization (profiles/registry settings), the user data added up to 1.19 TB. In a real world
scenario, the data reduction number is more in the order of 10 to 1 as the user data would differ more
than in our example. Note that the OS image doesn’t add to the physical space as most blocks are
deduplicated.

Unlike traditional storage arrays, we used a common LUN to store the OS image, user data, application
data, and persona. We don’t see any benefits in separating them on the FlashArray. We do not do data
reduction on a volume basis; it is done across the entire array, which is reflected in the shared data in
the capacity bar above.

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Server Configuration
Eight identical Intel CPU-based commodity servers were deployed for hosting the virtual desktops. The
server’s dual HBA ports were connected to two Cisco MDS 9148 SAN switches for upstream
connectivity to access the Pure Storage FlashArray LUNs. The server configuration is described in the
Table B below.

Component Description

Processor 2 X Intel Xeon X5690 @ 3.47GHz (12 Cores total, 24 Logical CPUs)

Memory 192 GB @ 1333 MHz (16GB X 12)

HBA Dual port Qlogic ISP2532-based 8Gb Fibre Channel PCIe card

NIC Quad port Intel Corp 82576 1Gb card

BIOS Intel Virtualization Tech, Intel AES-NI, Intel VT-D features were enabled

vSphere ESXi 5.1.0, Build 799733

Table B: Desktop host server configuration

SAN Configuration
Figure 2 shows the SAN switch connectivity with two Cisco 8Gb MDS 9148 Switch (48 ports). The key
point to note is that there is no single point of failure in the configuration. The connectivity is highly
resilient in terms of host initiator port or HBA failure, SAN switch failure, a controller port failure, or
even array controller failure. The zoning on the Cisco MDS follows best practices i.e a single initiator
and single target zoning. All eight ESXi host dual HBA port World Wide Names (pWWN) were zoned to
see the four Pure Storage FlashArray target port World Wide Names. The target ports were picked
such that on a given controller we had one port from each target Qlogic adapter connected to one
switch, the other Qlogic adapter port was connected to second switch (See Figure 2 for the wiring
details). This resulted in ESXi 5.1 hosts to see 8 distinct paths to the Pure Storage FlashArray LUNs
(Figure 7 shows vCenter datastore details). Check Appendix B for a sample Cisco MDS zoning.

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Figure 7: VMware VMFS datastore details

Network Configuration
Figure 8 below illustrates the network design used for the desktop deployment. A virtual machine was
setup to run AD/DNS and DHCP services and we used a private domain. As large numbers of desktops
were to be deployed, we wanted to setup our own private VLAN (VLAN 131) for desktops to hand out
IP addresses to virtual desktops that were spun up. A separate VLAN (VLAN 124) was used for
management network including the ESXi hosts on a single Cisco 3750 1Gb Ethernet switch (48 ports).

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Figure 8: Logical view of the reference architecture showing network configuration

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ESX Configuration and Tuning
ESXi 5.1.0, build 799733 was installed on eight identical servers and a separate infrastructure
management server. This section talks about the storage, network, and general system configuration
followed by specific tuning that was done to get the best performance. We started out with little or no
tuning and have narrowed down to a small set of ESXi tuning configurations. Due to the large number
of VMs and hosts VMware Management Assistant and vSphere powershell were used extensively and
helped us immensely in getting administrative tasks done efficiently.

Pure Storage FlashArray Best Practices for vSphere 5

The FlashArray is a VAAI-compliant, ALUA-based active/active array and doesn’t require a special
vSphere plugin to make the array work. The default storage array type plugin (SATP),
VMW_SATP_ALUA, is automatically selected. However, the default path selection policy (PSP) is
“Fixed” path. The PSP should be changed to Round Robin for all the Pure Storage LUNs as all paths to
FlashArray is active optimized. This can be done using vCenter, Webclient or ESXi command line (See
Appendix C for steps using vCenter). The following ESXi command accomplished this on a per device
basis -

esxcli storage nmp device set -d naa.6006016055711d00cff95e65664ee011 --psp=”VMW_PSP_RR”

We set all the Pure Storage LUNs to a round robin policy from vMA using the CLI command -

for i in `esxcli storage nmp device list | grep PURE|awk '{print $8}'|sed 's/(//g'|sed
's/)//g'` ; do esxcli storage nmp device set -d $i --psp=VMW_PSP_RR ; done

For our tests, we set the default PSP for VMW_SATP_ALUA as VMW_PSP_RR and every Pure Storage
LUN configured got the round robin policy. The following command accomplished that:

esxcli storage nmp satp set --default-psp="VMW_PSP_RR" --satp="VMW_SATP_ALUA"

Figure 9 shows a properly configured Pure Storage LUN with VMware Round Robin PSP.

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Figure 9: Pure Storage LUN configured with Round Robin path policy

ESXi 5.1 Configuration and Tuning

In this section, we discuss the ESXi 5.1 cluster configuration, network configuration and ESXi tuning for
the disk subsystem.

ESXi Cluster Configuration

A datacenter and a cluster with eight hosts were configured with VMware’s High Availability clustering
(HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) features. Because we were using VMware View 5.0,
the cluster was restricted to eight hosts, which was sufficient for deploying 1,000 virtual desktops. DRS
was set to be fully automatic so that the 1,000 desktops would be evenly distributed across the eight
hosts. The DRS power management was turned off and the host EVC policy was set to “Intel
Westmere”. The BIOS of each host was examined to make sure the Intel VT-d was on, AES-NI
instructions were enabled. The HA configuration was setup with VM restart priority as high and
isolation policy set to “leave powered on.” Finally, the swap file was stored along with the VM. A
resource pool was created for persistent desktops and linked-clone desktops with default settings.
Due to the one-to-one mapping of the ESX hosts in a cluster to the Pure Storage host group and hosts,
all hosts saw all the LUNs except for the private volumes used by each host for boot.

ESXi Network Configuration

Two virtual switches each containing two vmnics were used for each host. Although this design could
have taken advantage of distributed vSwitch (DVS), we went with standard vSwitch vowing to
Enterprise Plus licensing requirement. The redundant NICs were teamed in active/active mode and

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VLAN configurations were done on the upstream Cisco 3750 1GE switch. The switch provided an
internal private network and had a DNS helper which redirected to the infrastructure DNS and DHCP.
The virtual switch configuration and properties are shown in Figure 10 and Figure 11 respectively.

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Figure 10: VMware virtual switch configuration

The default 128 ports on a virtual switch were changed to 248, as there was a potential to put more
desktops on a single host (host reboot is mandated for this change). The MTU was left at 1500.

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Figure 11: Virtual switch properties showing 248 ports

vSphere System Level Tuning

In order to get the best performance out of the FlashArray some of the default disk parameters in
vSphere had to be changed, because the default values are applicable to spindle based arrays that
are commonly deployed in the data center. The two disk parameters that were changed to a higher
value for this work are Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding (default value of 32) and Disk.SchedQuantam
(default value of 8) to 256 and 64 respectively. The former, DSNRO, will limit the amount of I/Os that
will be issued to the LUN. This parameter was tuned to a maximum limit so the FlashArray can service
more I/Os. The best treatise on this topic can be found in [See reference 4]. The latter,
Disk.SchedQuantum value determines the number of concurrent I/Os that can be serviced from each
world (a world is equivalent to a process in VMkernel terms), so we set that value to its maximum value
of 64. Figure 12 below shows how to set it using a vCenter on a host by host basis.

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Figure 12: vCenter snapshot of setting Disk tunables

The same can be accomplished by using a vMA appliance and the command line (a script was used to
configure these settings):

esxcfg-advcfg –set 256 /Disk/SchedNumReqOutstanding

esxcfg-advcfg –set 64 /Disk/SchedQuantum

The qlogic HBA max queue depth was increased to 64 from its default value on all hosts (see VMware
KB article 1267 for setting this value):

# esxcfg-module qla2xxx -g ql2xmaxqdepth

qla2xxx enabled = 1 options = 'ql2xmaxqdepth=64'

There was no other tuning that was done to the vSphere server.

Management and Infrastructure Virtual Machines

In order to scale the environment it is important to have robust and efficient infrastructure components.
As per the design principles, we built the management and infrastructure VMs on a separate
management host server running ESXi 5.1.0. Why? Because as we scale this environment, we expect
Active directory and DNS/DHCP will have to scale to give the best possible user experience, so we will

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need dedicated host resources to support that growth.

We created a master Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 template with all the updates and cloned the
different infrastructure VMs. The SQL server VM hosted the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 database
instance of the vCenter database and the VMware View events logging database. The VMware® View
Planner is a product of VMware, Inc. and can be obtained via the VMware partner program website.
Their newest version of View Planner 2.1 is a Centos-based appliance available in the form of a OVF to
deploy in vCenter. The description of each of the infrastructure component is shown in Figure 13.

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Figure 13: Infrastructure Virtual Machine component detailed description

The management infrastructure host used for the infrastructure VMs was provisioned with a 600 GB
LUN; the server configuration is shown in Table C below.

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Table C: Management infrastructure host configuration details

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Desktop Software Configuration
VMware View 5 Overview
VMware View 5 is a desktop virtualization solution that simplifies IT manageability and control while
delivering one of the highest fidelity end-user experiences across devices and networks.

The VMware View solution helps IT organizations automate desktop and application management,
reduce costs and increase data security through centralization of the desktop environment. This
centralization results in greater end-user freedom and increased control for IT organizations. By
encapsulating the operating systems, applications and user data into isolated layers, IT organizations
can deliver a modern desktop. It can then deliver dynamic, elastic desktop cloud services such as
applications, unified communications and 3D graphics for real-world productivity and greater business
agility.

Unlike other desktop virtualization products, VMware View is built on, and tightly integrated with,
vSphere, the industry-leading virtualization platform, allowing customers to extend the value of
VMware infrastructure and its enterprise class features such as high availability, disaster recovery and
business continuity.

View 5 includes many enhancements to the end-user experience and IT control. Some of the more
notable features include:

• PCoIP Optimization Controls—deliver protocol efficiency and enable IT administrators to

configure bandwidth settings by use case, user or network requirements and consume up to
75 percent less bandwidth

• PCoIP Continuity Services—deliver a seamless end-user experience regardless of network

reliability by detecting interruptions and automatically reconnecting the session

• PCoIP Extension Services—allow Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)–based tools to

collect more than 20 session statistics for monitoring, trending and troubleshooting end-user
support issues

• View Media Services for 3D Graphics—enable View desktops to run basic 3D applications such
as Aero, Office 2010 or those requiring OpenGL or DirectX—without specialized graphics cards
or client devices

• View Media Services for Integrated Unified Communications—integrate voice over IP (VoIP)
and the View desktop experience for the end user through an architecture that optimizes
performance for both the desktop and unified communications

• View Persona Management (View Premier editions only)—dynamically associates a user

persona with stateless floating desktops. IT administrators can deploy easier-to-manage
stateless floating desktops to more use cases while enabling user personalization to persist
between sessions

• View Client for Android—enables end users with Android-based tablets to access View virtual
desktops

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Support for VMware vSphere 5 leverages the latest functionality of the leading cloud infrastructure
platform for highly available, scalable and reliable desktop services.

For additional details and features available in VMware View 5, see the release notes.

Typical VMware View 5 deployments consist of several common components (illustrated in Figure 14
below), which represent a typical architecture. It includes VMware View components as well as other
components commonly integrated with VMware View.

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Figure 14: VMware View architecture overview

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VMware View Configuration
VMware View 5.0.1 (build 640055) was installed on a Windows 2008 R2 VM with 4 vCPU/8GB of
memory. The View Composer 2.7.0 (build 481620) was installed on the vCenter VM for linked clone
deployment. We used the View connection server to deploy all the Windows 7 desktops for View
Planner testing. The automated floating desktop pool settings (for View composer based linked
clones) to deploy 1,000 linked clone and a 1,000 dedicated Windows 7 desktops is shown below.

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Figure 15: Automated desktop pool settings for Windows 7

Other changes to View connection included increasing the number of concurrent operations on the
Virtual Center server.

VMware View Administrator ! View Configuration ! Servers ! vCenter Servers ! Edit ! Advanced

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In order to do faster recompose, we changed the settings on the View Composer to do batches of 100

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desktops rather than the default 12 desktops [reference 1, page 18 has details on this]. FlashArray
could easily sustain the load and the operations finished in a few minutes each; see the recompose
section for more details.

Desktop Operating System - Microsoft Windows 7 Configuration

The View Planner document [see reference 4] provided guidelines for configuring the base Windows 7
image. In order to get a successful View Planner run, adjustments were made to the base image
before we took a snapshot and created a pool of 1,000 linked clones and a separate pool of 1,000
dedicated persistent desktops. Table D describes the configuration of the desktops.

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Table D: Windows 7 virtual desktop configuration summary

Software Testing Tool – VMware View Planner 2.1

VMware View Planner is a tool designed by VMware to simulate a large‐scale deployment of
virtualized desktop systems and study its effects on an entire virtualized infrastructure. The tool is
scalable from a few virtual machines running on one VMware vSphere host up to thousands of virtual
machines distributed across a cluster of vSphere hosts.

View Planner runs a set of application operations selected to be representative of real‐world user
applications, and reports data on the latencies of those operations. In our tests, we used this tool to
simulate a real world scenario, then accepted the resultant application latency as a metric to measure
end user experience.

View Planner has three run modes based on what is getting tested, including passive mode, remote
mode and local mode. We did local mode testing with VMware View based desktops with the

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following settings:

The View Planner appliance was made accessible to Pure Storage, a VMware partner, as part of the
Rapid Desktop program. Test bed was configured and Windows 7 desktop base image setup was
done in strict adherence to the View Planner installation and user guide document, version 2.1.

The following parameters were tweaked in the View Planner adminops.cfg file for booting more
machines at a time:

CONCURRENT_POWERONS_ONE_MINUTE=100
CONCURRENT_LOGONS_ONE_MINUTE=100
RESET_TIMER_PERIOD_IN_SECONDS=1800
POWERON_DESKTOPS=1

Testing Methodology and Success Criteria

Once the View Planner workload generator is run, it produces a View Planner score. This score
indicates how many users concurrently running a standardized set of operations a particular
virtualization infrastructure platform can support. The standardized view Planner workload consists of
nine applications performing a combined total of 44 user operations. The tests are divided into three
groups: A, B and C. The final score represents the 95th percentile score of group A operations )used
to determine the Quality of Service (QoS)).

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Test Results
Pure Storage achieved a score of 0.52 seconds for group A operations. This is dramatically below the
1.5 second response time for a passing score. This score was consistent for both the linked clone runs
as well as the full desktop clone runs. We did multiple runs and got near identical results. Figure 16
below is the plot of the average mean response time of View Planner Group A application operations
for both linked clone desktops and persistent desktops.

!
Figure 16: View Planner “Group A” Operations Latency

Figure 17 below shows the Pure Storage GUI dashboard, which shows that the latency during the
entire duration of the tests was within 1 millisecond. The maximum CPU utilization on the servers was
78% and the memory used was 100% as shown in Figure 18. We saw no ballooning and no swapping
as we had 192 GB of memory on each virtual desktop server host.

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 !
Figure 17: Pure Storage Dashboard view during View Planner run

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Figure 18: vCenter performance data of a single host; CPU and memory utilization

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 SUMMARY OF RESULTS
• View Planner score of 0.52 achieved for both linked clone and persistent desktops
• 1,000 linked clone desktops created in less than two hours
• 1,000 desktops recomposed in less than 2 hours
• 1,000 desktops booted in 10 minutes and sustained sub-1ms latency and 50,000 IOPS
• Data reduction (deduplication and compression) in excess of 10-to-1 across all desktops
!

Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray for View Deployment

The Pure Storage FlashArray fundamentally changes the storage experience from a virtualized data
center perspective [Reference 2 talks in-depth on this topic]. Virtual desktop deployment with VMware
View is a great use case for FlashArray, due to its very low latency and efficient use of data reduction
to increase storage efficiency. We have demonstrated the high throughput and low latency aspect
resulting in half a second application response times with VMware View Planner workload.

Ease of Storage Capacity Management and Storage Provisioning

The Pure Storage GUI and CLI was designed with one goal in mind: simplify storage management. The
GUI dashboard is a central location for getting capacity, IOPS/Latency/Bandwidth and system status
(see Figure 17 & Figure 18). Most commonly used operations are simple two step operations, including
creation of a LUN, increasing LUN size, or masking a LUN to a host. The LUN connection map will alert
you if the host FC ports are zoned correctly and has redundant connectivity to the FlashArray (see
Figure 19 below). This feature is included for all platforms with no agents in the OS.

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 !
Figure 19: Connections map for hosts connected to Pure Storage FlashArray

Common operations like creating virtual machine clones from template, Storage vMotion, vmfs
datastore creation, VM snapshots, and general infrastructure deployment are all tremendously
accelerated compared to mechanical disk.

Storage administrators have adapted to myriads of painstaking ordeals to provision storage and it is
refreshing to see that those practices can be put to rest with our storage management approach. In
addition to ease of storage capacity management and provisioning we found several benefits that help
in rapid deployment and adaption of virtual desktops. These benefits of FlashArray for virtual desktops
are broadly classified into three sections and we describe them in detail in the next subsection.

• VDI operational aspects – Pool maintenance (Recomposing desktops), efficiencies while

booting or rebooting desktops

• Data center power, cooling and rack space savings

• Lower cost per desktop

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Benefits of Pure Storage FlashArray in Common Virtual Desktop Operations
Recomposing Desktops
Pushing out patches to desktops is a common operation and hosting the desktop in the data center
promises to make this process much more efficient. But in traditional deployments this task consumes
lots of time and results in very high backend disk array IOPS. Desktop admins perform this task during
non-peak hours, weekends and in small batches.

With the FlashArray, we were able to demonstrate a 1,000 desktop patch push out in less than two
hours while sustaining 40K IOPS with half millisecond latencies. See Figure 20 below for the
FlashArray GUI dashboard view during recomposing 1,000 desktops. We tuned the View composer to
perform more concurrently, as mentioned in the View configuration section.

Desktop administrators can recompose their desktops anytime of the day, as the IOPS and latency are
not a limiter on the FlashArray. They can even recompose a pool of desktops that is not in use while
other pools are actively in use. This not only makes pushing out patches more efficient, but also keeps
the organization free from malware, virus infections, worms and other common bugs that plague
desktops due to a lack of timely updates. The efficiency of the organization improves many folds and
the software applications are always up-to-date.

!
Figure 20: Dashboard view of recomposing 1,000 desktops in less than two hours

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Reduced Desktop Boot Times
When using mechanical disk storage arrays, constant pool maintenance activities can lead to
unpredictable spikes in storage performance. This is a real project killer in virtual desktop deployment
projects. When View admins spin up a pool the desktops power up and create a boot storm, this has
the adverse effect of hindering the active users. The same is true when users login and logout; it
creates login and logoff storms respectively.

We simulated the worst-case scenario of powering on 1,000 virtual desktops and measuring the
backend IOPS. The Figure 21 below shows the Pure Storage GUI dashboard for this activity. We
sustained upwards of 55K IOPS and booted 1,000 virtual desktops in less than 10 minutes while
maintaining less than 1 msec latency. This is phenomenal testimony of how the FlashArray can
withstand heavy load like boot storms and still deliver sub-millisecond latency.

!
Figure 21: Booting 1,000 VMs in less than 10 minutes with sustained IOPS upto 50K and < 1msec
latency

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Data Center Efficiencies
As data centers get denser and denser the lack of rack space and challenges around power and
cooling (availability and rising cost) are increasingly prevalent problems. In comparison to a spindle
based storage system, the Pure Storage FlashArray has no moving parts except for the fans. The
FlashArray’s smallest configuration can be fit in 4 Rack units (RU) space in a standard data center rack.
This section talks in detail about the additional data center efficiency advantages the FlashArray
brings. As data center power rates are going through the roof, this becomes a huge factor in storage
total cost of ownership calculations. The overall VDI operational budget needs to consider datacenter
power and space, as previously a desktop’s power and cooling impact was coming out of the facilities
budget and not from the datacenter budget.

Power and Cooling

A fully loaded FA-320 with two controllers and two shelves uses less than 10 Amps of power (110V AC).
The FA-310 with one controller and one shelf consume about a half of that i.e. 5 Amps of power. The
SSDs used in the FlashArray are low power consuming devices and dissipate very little heat, which in
turn reduces cooling overhead.

Rack Space Savings

A FA-310, 4U box can deliver up to 200K IOPS and with latencies less than 1 msec. A fully loaded FA-
320 occupies only 8U of rack space and delivers same results with complete high availability. Rack
space is a highly priced commodity in a data center, the advantages of having a low foot print will help
in scaling the number of desktops per rack units of storage. This was one of the key takeaways of our
project.

Lower Cost per Desktop

The number one cost in any virtual desktop deployment is storage. Scaling from a pilot of a few
hundred desktops to large scale production use needs a lot more capacity and IOPS, which is readily
available on the FlashArray. Throughout the various phases of this project, we deployed more than
3,000 virtual desktops of mixed types on a single FlashArray. Based on the test results, you can easily
put in excess of 5,000 desktops on the FlashArray. Additional desktops do not consume additional
storage capacity (excepting the user data).

In the next section we talk more about the different configurations of FlashArray that can be procured
for your VDI deployment. The different form factors are designed to host certain number of desktops
and cost varies based on the FlashArray configuration deployed.

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Sizing Guidelines
The space consumption and the IOPS we saw in the 1,000 desktop deployment could easily have
been sustained in the smallest FlashArray configuration. As the deployment grows, it is easy to expand
capacity by adding more shelves to the array without downtime.

As shown in the Figure 22 below, a pilot can be implemented on a single controller and ½ drive shelf
system. As the deployment passes out of the pilot phase, you can upgrade to a two-controller HA
system and ½ drive shelf for 1,000 desktops. As your user data grows, additional shelves can be
added. Both controllers and shelves can be added without downtime.

If more desktops are needed, customers can expand to a full shelf to accommodate up to 2,000
desktops. For a 5,000 desktop deployment or larger, we recommend a fully-configured FA-320 with
two controllers and two drive shelves. The sizing guidelines below are approximations based upon
best practices, your actual desktop density may vary depending on how the desktops are configured,
whether or not user data is stored in the desktops or the array, and a variety of other factors. Pure
Storage recommends a pilot deployment in your user community to fully-understand space and
performance requirements.

Adding a new shelf to increase capacity is very straightforward and involves simply connecting SAS
cables from the controller to the new shelf that can be done while the array is online. The Pure Storage
FlashArray features stateless controllers, which means all the configuration information is stored on the
storage shelves instead of within the controllers themselves. In the event of a controller failure, one
can easily swap out a failed controller with a new controller without reconfiguring SAN zoning, which
again can be done non-disruptively.

Stage Pilot Go Live Expand Scale-Up

Users 100s-1,000 Up to 1,000 Up to 2,000 5,000+

Raw Capacity 2.75 TB 2.75 TB 5.5 TB 11 TB

Usable VDI Capacity* 10-20 TB 10-20 TB 20-50 TB 50-100 TB

!
Figure 22: Pure Storage Virtual Desktop Sizing

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Conclusions
We set out to prove that virtual desktop deployment is an ideal use case for the Pure Storage
FlashArray and we achieved unprecedented results while running an industry-standard desktop
workload generator. The View Planner score of 0.52 is a testimony of the FlashArray’s ability to deliver
an unmatched VDI end-user experience. Beyond user experience, the FlashArray demonstrated
additional VDI administrative and operational benefits, including rapid desktop provisioning, ease of
storage management, lower storage cost, lower power, rack space savings, and lower cooling
requirements. The FlashArray’s integrated data reduction delivered >20-to-1 reduction of the VDI
workload, enabling the use of either linked clone desktops or full-clone persistent desktops
interchangeably, and delivering all-flash VDI storage for less than $100/desktop in most configurations.
Furthermore, we expect the FlashArray can scale up to 5,000+ virtual desktops with proper
infrastructure in place.

Now that Pure Storage has broken the price barrier for VDI on
100% flash storage, why risk your VDI deployment on disk?
!

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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank VMware for providing the View Planner tool through the partner
program and reviewing the work leading to this publication. Special thanks to Banit Agarwal in VMware
View performance team for his help in troubleshooting View Planner configuration and View tuning.
Thanks to Mac Binesh in VMware EUC reference architecture team for his support and providing the
VMware View content for this document.

About the Author

!
Ravindra “Ravi” Venkat is a Virtualization Solutions Architect at Pure Storage
where he strives to be the company’s expert at the intersection of flash and
virtualization. Prior to that he held a similar role at Cisco for two plus years where
he helped drive the virtualization benefits of Cisco's new servers - Unified
Computing System (UCS). He helped build reference architectures and
! virtualization solutions that are still being used today.

Prior to that he was part of the storage ecosystem engineering team at VMware for
three years, and a lead engineer at VERITAS working on storage virtualization,
volume management and file system technologies for the prior eight years.

Ravi maintains a blog at http://www.purestorage.com/blog/author/ravi and you can

follow him on twitter @ravivenk.

References
1. VMware View 5 Performance and Best Practices: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view/VMware-
View-Performance-Study-Best-Practices-Technical-White-Paper.pdf

2. Pure Storage FlashArray – Virtualization Benefits: Three part blog article:

http://www.purestorage.com/blog/say-goodbye-to-vm-alignment-issues-and-poor-performance-with-
pure-storage/

3. DSNRO, the story: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/06/23/disk-schednumreqoutstanding-the-

story/

4. VMware View Planner Installation and User Guide – Version 2.1 dated 10/24/2011
!

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APPENDIX A
Pure Storage LUN provisioning
The following example creates a 4 TB volume, VDIVolume-001 and a host called ESXHost-001. A
hostgroup called PureESXCluster is created with ESXHost-001 and the volume, VDIVolume-001 is
connected to the hostgroup, PureESXCluster.

purevol create VDIVolume-001 –size 4t

purehost create –wwnlist 21:00:00:00:ab:cd:ef:00,21:00:00:00:ab:cd:ef:01 ESXHost-001

purehgroup create –hostlist ESXHost-001 PureESXCluster

purehost connect –vol VDIVolume-001 PureESXCluster

New hosts are created using step 2 and purehgroup setattr –addhostlist HOSTLIST HGROUP is used
new hosts to the host group.

The figure below shows the Pure Host Group and LUN configuration.

!
The Pure Storage GUI can accomplish this using similar operation.

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APPENDIX B
Cisco MDS zoning sample
Single initiator and single target zoning example script to configure a single port of the Pure Storage
FlashArray port to all initiator HBA ports.

# conf t

(config) # zoneset name pure-esx-vdi-cluster-zoneset vsan 100

(config-zoneset) # zone name zone_pureArray_Port1_hpesx2_vmhba1

(config-zone) # member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:23:27:aa

(config-zone) # member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:32:87:32

(config-zone) # exit

(config-zoneset) # zone name zone_pureArray_Port1_hpesx2_vmhba2

(config-zone) # member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:23:27:aa

(config-zone) # member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:27:29:e6

(config-zone) # exit

(config-zoneset) # zone name zone_pureArray_Port1_hpesx2_vmhba3

(config-zone) # member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:23:27:aa

(config-zone) # member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:32:87:26

(config-zone) # exit

(config-zoneset) # zone name zone_pureArray_Port1_hpesx2_vmhba4

(config-zone) # member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:23:27:aa

(config-zone) # member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:27:2d:04

(config-zone) # exit

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APPENDIX C
Setting up Round-Robin PSP on a Pure LUN:

! !

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!

Pure Storage, Inc.

Twitter: @purestorage

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Mountain View, CA 94041

T: 650-290-6088
F: 650-625-9667

Sales: sales@purestorage.com
Support: support@purestorage.com
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General: info@purestorage.com

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