Best Practice of VMware Horizon View 5.3 VDI Based on HUAWEI OceanStor Series Enterprise Storage Systems. Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Transcription

1 Best Practice of VMware Horizon View 5.3 VDI Based on HUAWEI OceanStor Series Enterprise Storage Systems Li Jie IT Storage Solution SDT, Huawei Enterprise BG V1.0 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

2 Contents 1 Introduction Overview About the Best Practice Audience Glossary HUAWEI OceanStor Series Overview Secure and Trusted Flexible and Efficient Robust Reliability High Scalability Smart Matrix Architecture RAID 2.0+ Fully Virtualized Intelligent Volume Smart Series Software Hyper Series Data Protection Software Introduction to VMware Horizon View Overview Linked Clone User File Management View Storage Accelerator SE Sparse Virtual Disk Best Practice of VDI Storage Design Overview VDI Workloads Login Storm Steady State OceanStor Carrying Workloads User Types Capacity Planning Performance Planning Disk Performance RAID Performance Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 1

3 4.6.3 Exemplification Best Practice of VDI Storage Implementation Overview Best Practice on the Storage Tier Creating Disk Domains Creating Storage Pools Creating LUNs Creating Hosts and Host Groups Creating Port Groups Creating Mapping Views Configuring VAAI Best Practice on the Application Tier Configuring Multipathing Creating Clusters Creating VM Templates Configuring View Storage Accelerator and Space Reclamation Summary Appendix Introduction to the 1000 Users Verification Test Network Diagram Software and Hardware Configurations Introduction to Login VSI Test results Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 2

4 1 Introduction 1.1 Overview As virtual desktop technology matures, an increasing number of enterprises are adding virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to their IT architecture. A successful VDI environment must provide secure, reliable, personalized, and mobility-ready office desktops. With virtualization, hybrid cloud, thin IT, and low carbon footprint features, HUAWEI OceanStor series enterprise storage systems (the OceanStor series) are the best storage platform for the new-generation data center. It is also the optimum storage platform for constructing secure, efficient, and salable VDI. To construct a successful VDI environment that has predictable performance and scalability, a well-considered plan and targeted implementation is necessary. User experience and personal data must be factored into the VDI design. After the VDI design is implemented, all virtual desktops must share CPU, memory, network, and storage resources. The VDI design must be such that all desktops always have sufficient resources, including CPU, memory, and network resources. Based on that precondition, this best practice document aims to help enterprises construct the best infrastructure for virtual desktops by fully utilizing the advantages of the OceanStor (one of the two OceanStor series). This document contains the following parts: Introduction to the OceanStor series Introduction to VMware Horizon View Best practice of VDI storage design Implementation of the best practice 1.2 About the Best Practice As the first version, this document applies only the basic functions of the OceanStor to the VDI design, while its value-added features are outside the scope of this document. The suggestions and best practice proposed in this document are based on the following conditions: FC protocol is used for its high performance. 2.5-inch 10k rpm SAS disks are used as storage media. VDI users are office users. (For details about user types, see section 4.4 "User Types.") Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 3

5 Linked clone desktops. The capacity size for storing the desktops is negligible All the suggestions in this document apply to only one scenario: VMware Horizon View is deployed on the OceanStor In addition to this document, Huawei and its partners provide professional services to help customers complete the VDI design covered in this document. These services enable customers to build the best storage architecture and solution for their VDI environments. 1.3 Audience This document is intended for personnel responsible for the construction, design, management, and support of VMware VDI solutions. The readers are expected to have a working knowledge of the following: OceanStor series VMware vsphere and VMware Horizon View 1.4 Glossary Term SAS XVE OceanStor DeviceManager VDI SE Sparse VSA CBRC TP LUN RAID TCO RTO Boot storm/shutdown storm Description Serial Attached SCSI Operating environment of the OceanStor series An integrated Huawei storage management platform for easy and convenient configuration, management, and maintenance of storage devices Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Space-Efficient Sparse, a type of virtual disk View Storage Accelerator, a feature that uses ESXi host memory to cache VM disk data, reducing pressure on the storage system Content-based read cache Thin Provisioning Logical Unit Number Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks Total cost of ownership Recovery Time Objective Huge consumption of computing and storage resources caused by simultaneous startup or shutdown of numerous VMs Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 4

6 2 HUAWEI OceanStor Series 2.1 Overview The OceanStor series is the ideal storage platform designed for new-generation data centers. Boasting high reliability, excellent scalability, and outstanding efficiency, the OceanStor series addresses the mission-critical service storage requirements of various industries, including finance, government, energy, manufacturing, transportation, education, and telecommunication. Figure 2-1 OceanStor series storage system The following describes the highlights of the OceanStor series. 2.2 Secure and Trusted Multi-controller full-redundancy architecture: zero single point of failure and load balancing, ensuring stable system running RAID 2.0+ disk virtualization: no hotspot disk and 20 times faster data recovery, greatly improving data reliability Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 5

7 Comprehensive disaster recovery solution: industry's shortest RPO of 0 to 5 seconds and one-click disaster recovery management, protecting business continuity to the maximum 2.3 Flexible and Efficient Maximum specifications One million SPC-1 IOPS, 16 controllers, 3 TB cache, 7 PB capacity, scalable based on demands, meeting storage requirements in the next 10 years Fastest response World's only enterprise storage systems that respond in microseconds, delivering 10 times faster service processing Highest efficiency Maximized storage system efficiency, improving storage utilization by three times 2.4 Robust Reliability The OceanStor series offers incomparable reliability in terms of architecture, data storage, and applications to ensure business continuity. With the Smart Matrix architecture, the OceanStor series is able to provide 16 fully redundant controllers to maintain system reliability. All the controllers are optically interconnected through PCIe 2.0 to support lossless data exchange among them. All OceanStor components and channels are redundantly configured so that fault detection, correction, and isolation can be independently carried out on each module or channel without interrupting system services. The OceanStor series leverages the innovative block virtualization technology to shorten reconstruction time per TB data from 10 hours to 30 minutes, accelerating data reconstruction by 20 times and greatly enhancing data reliability. End-to-end data integrity verification means are implemented based on the Protection Information (PI) technology to prevent data from being damaged. SmartQoS and SmartPartition help critical services get sufficient resources for continuous business running. The Hyper series data protection software executes local and remote protection for customers' data, and ensures business continuity by working with Huawei disaster recovery solutions. PI+DIX end-to-end data protection The OceanStor series offers the PI+DIX end-to-end data integrity solution to protect data integrity ranging from application systems, host bus adapters (HBAs), storage systems, to disks. The PI+DIX solution prevents silent data corruption and delivers end-to-end data protection. Intensity 9 earthquake resistance The OceanStor series is the only enterprise storage product that has passed the intensity 9 earthquake resistance test held by the Communication Equipment Earthquake Resistance Performance Quality Inspection and Testing Center, which is under China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The OceanStor series can prevent faults caused Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 6

8 by mechanical vibrations that occur during transportation and operation. Moreover, the OceanStor series can resist 90% earthquakes in 50 years and ensures zero data loss in case of serious earthquakes. Predictable and manageable SSD lifetime The OceanStor 18800F all-flash enterprise storage system employs the global wear leveling technology to balance the erase frequency of flash cells globally while reducing the erase times of solid-state drives (SSDs) that have little redundant space. The SSD life span is extended as a result. Meanwhile, the OceanStor 18800F provides the unique global anti-wear leveling technology to centralize flash erase operations onto only a few SSDs when most SSDs have reached their wear thresholds, reducing the probability of multi-disk failure to a large degree. The OceanStor 18800F is able to accurately predict the lifetime of SSDs based on flash erase times, and uses a graphical user interface (GUI) to intuitively show SSD lifetime. 2.5 High Scalability The OceanStor series is highly scalable and supports on-demand capacity and performance expansion. Built on the Smart Matrix architecture, the OceanStor series can be configured with a maximum of 3216 disks to provide a capacity up to 7 PB. An OceanStor storage system supports a maximum of 3 TB cache and 192 Fibre Channel or iscsi ports. The 4S expansion technology includes scale-up, scale-out, scale-deep, and scale-in. Scale-up increases storage capacity and performance of controllers. Scale-out enables storage performance to increase linearly with capacity. Scale-deep consolidates third-party storage resources. Scale-in expands performance and capacity of host volumes without adding any hardware resources, and allows the storage system to infinitely adapt to service needs. The OceanStor series is a distributed multi-controller storage system whose controllers can increase from 2 to 16 non-disruptively with the scale-out technology. A maximally configured OceanStor storage system consists of eight system bays and two disk bays. Each system bay can house a maximum of inch disks or inch disks. Each disk bay can house a maximum of inch disks. The OceanStor series offers the disk options of ultrafast enterprise-class SSDs, high-performance enterprise-class SAS disks, and large-capacity NL-SAS disks, as well as the port options of 8 Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports and 10 Gbit/s Ethernet ports used for FCoE and iscsi connections. The OceanStor series maintains a microsecond-level latency to provide quick response to critical services. 2.6 Smart Matrix Architecture Smart Matrix architecture The Smart Matrix architecture is exclusively incorporated by the OceanStor series and enables an OceanStor storage system to scale up to 16 controllers, 3 TB cache, and 7 PB capacity, breaking the limit of the traditional dual-controller architecture and leading to unprecedented system scalability and availability. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 7

9 PCIe optical interconnection The Smart Matrix architecture adopts PCIe 2.0 to interconnect all controllers in full switch mode and deliver a bandwidth up to 192 GB/s. Each controller integrates front- and back-end ports and global cache, and allows data to be flushed to disks simultaneously from multiple controllers to improve I/O efficiency. Scale-out expansion The Smart Matrix architecture enables system resources to increase linearly. Controllers of an OceanStor storage system can online expand to 16 and be deployed in a distributed manner in the data center. 2.7 RAID 2.0+ Fully Virtualized Intelligent Volume New-generation intelligent disk management technology Space on all disks in a storage system is divided into chunks. The chunks constitute chunk groups (CKGs), which are divided into extents. The extents then form LUNs. This process enables data to be evenly distributed on disks, greatly improving I/O performance, eliminating hot spot disks, reducing the disk failure rate, and enhancing system reliability. Each disk reserves certain hot spare space. Once a disk is faulty, all the other disks participate in data reconstruction, accelerating data recovery by 20 times and further boosting system reliability. Smart series resource allocation software The Smart series software provides the OceanStor series with high efficiency and flexibility. SmarTier automatically optimizes performance and lowers costs. SmartMotion dynamically adjusts data distribution to balance performance and capacity among disks. SmartThin optimizes storage space utilization. SmartQoS controls service quality and prioritize resource demands of critical services. SmartPartition partitions and isolates storage cache, and guarantees cache resources for critical services. SmartVirtualization consolidates heterogeneous storage resources, simplifying storage management and maximizing customers' return on investment (ROI). 2.8 Smart Series Software SmartQoS service quality control SmartQoS classifies I/Os into priority-specific queues according to application priorities. Sufficient storage resources are reserved for I/O queues with high priorities to meet their performance requirements, while a performance upper threshold is set for applications with low priorities to avoid overuse of resources. The execution period of a SmartQoS policy is customizable. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 8

10 SmartPartition cache partitioning SmartPartition sets cache partition requirements for critical services, dynamically allocates cache resources to services based on the requirements, and isolates the cache resources between services, preventing unnecessary cache competition and ensuring performance of critical services. SmartTier intelligent storage tiering SmartTier creates different storage tiers based on disk types, analyzes the access frequency of data, and migrates data among tiers based on analysis results. This feature ensures that data is stored in proper storage media, improving system performance and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). SmartMotion balanced performance and capacity among disks SmartMotion analyzes the access frequency of data and available capacity on a type of disks, and migrates data among those disks to balance performance and capacity among disks of the same type. This feature eliminates disk hot spots, and improves disk utilization and system performance. In system expansion, SmartMotion reallocates performance and capacity to ensure smooth expansion. SmartThin optimal resource allocation SmartThin allocates storage space on demand and reclaims unused space of typical applications such as VMware, Veritas Storage Foundation, and Windows Server. The space is allocated and reclaimed at a granularity of 64 KB. SmartThin also supports space preallocation for thin LUNs. SmartVirtualization heterogeneous storage virtualization SmartVirtualization consolidates storage resources on a live network by taking control of heterogeneous storage systems to make full use of legacy storage space, reduce management complexity, and maximize customers' ROI. 2.9 Hyper Series Data Protection Software HyperSnap HyperSnap generates snapshots for a source volume of any capacity at specified points in time without interrupting system services. Those snapshots can be used for backup, testing, data mining, and data recovery when the original data is lost by accident. HyperSnap stores only changed data to save storage space. HyperClone HyperClone generates physical copies (data mirrors) for a primary LUN. After synchronizing and splitting the primary LUN and secondary LUN, users obtain physical copies that are consistent with the primary LUN. A primary LUN in a HyperClone task has a maximum of 16 physical copies, which can be used for different purposes. HyperReplication/S HyperReplication/S replicates data synchronously from a primary LUN to a secondary LUN on a different storage array. Data is consistent between the primary and secondary LUNs. This feature ensures data availability at disaster recovery sites and achieves zero data loss. HyperReplication/A Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 9

11 HyperReplication/A replicates data asynchronously from a primary LUN to a secondary LUN at a remote site that may be thousands of kilometers away. HyperReplication/A supports a minimum RPO of 5 seconds, minimizing data loss caused by system downtime. The customizable periodic synchronization policy helps mitigate the impact on application and host performance. HyperReplication/CG HyperReplication/CG allows multiple data volumes that apply the same replication policy to form a consistency group to ensure operation consistency among the data volumes. ReplicationDirector Huawei OceanStor ReplicationDirector is designed to manage disaster recovery of enterprise data centers. ReplicationDirector incorporates application awareness and value-added features of Huawei storage systems to ensure application data consistency during disaster recovery. This software helps users efficiently configure disaster recovery, easily monitor the running of disaster recovery services, and conveniently perform disaster recovery tests. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 10

12 3 Introduction to VMware Horizon View 3.1 Overview VMware Horizon View, formerly known as VMware View, is a VDI solution that simplifies desktop management and provides on-demand service. It expands VMware server deployments to bring VDI advantages to virtual desktops. Figure 3-1 Architecture of VMware Horizon View Based on vsphere 5.5 virtualization architecture, Horizon View 5.3 offers the following: Desktop management End user experience Flexible access Cloud environment compatibility The version of VMware Horizon View in this document is 5.3. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 11

13 This chapter covers technologies used in the best practice or related to storage costs and performance. 3.2 Linked Clone The linked clone function, provided by Horizon View Composer, can create multiple desktop images based on a golden master image. The latest View Composer version has removed the restriction of allowing a maximum of only eight hosts in a cluster. It supports large host pools, accelerates deployment and reconstruction, and ensures the instant and uniform update of any number of virtual desktops. When used in conjunction with ThinApp, Horizon View Composer reduces the total amount of images, required storage capacity, and operating costs. This best practice uses the latest version of Horizon View Composer to link clone desktops, improving deployment and maintenance efficiency and reducing the required number of disks. 3.3 User Datas Management Horizon View Persona Management provides consistent personalized experience for end users and offers low-cost stateless desktops. Such desktops bring down IT costs while providing end users with "familiar" desktop appearances (last desktop state retained) and faster login. Desktops covered in this document are all linked clone desktops. System capacity planning will not be discussed. 3.4 View Storage Accelerator vsphere 5.0 and later versions allow VM disk data to be cached to ESXi hosts. This function is called View Storage Accelerator (VSA), which leverages content-based read cache (CBRC) of ESXi hosts. With VSA, hosts no longer need to read the entire storage operating system. Instead, it reads common data blocks from the CBRC to improve access performance. In this document, VSA is used to ease the pressure of partial storms in VDI. 3.5 SE Sparse Virtual Disk VMware started providing the SE sparse virtual disk feature in its VMware vsphere 5.1. Linked clone desktops can use SE sparse virtual disks as system disks to reclaim storage space, further reducing the storage space required by permanent desktops. This best practice uses SE Sparse virtual disks to greatly save storage space and eliminate the risk of system disk capacity shortage. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 12

14 4 Best Practice of VDI Storage Design 4.1 Overview During VDI design and implementation, storage system planning is the most complex and critical step. Storage planning can be even more complex if user requirements are not clear. As far as storage planning is concerned, user requirements mainly include capacity and performance requirements. As previously mentioned, this best practice mainly involves the planning for the storage system where VDI system disks reside. Using VMware linked clone technology and SE Sparse virtual disk technology, this best practice reduces the storage space consumed by initially installed system disks by around 90% than traditional storage environments. Therefore, the storage planning covered in this best practice centers on the storage capacity of data disks and performance of VDI system disks. To understand user requirements, the types of workload that occur during the VDI production period must be analyzed. This chapter starts from VDI workload analysis and explores how to leverage the features of the OceanStor to carry those workloads. Then it goes on to summarize storage planning of the OceanStor and comes up with the storage capacity and performance plan based on Huawei's storage test experience. In addition, this chapter serves as a theoretical basis for the best practice implementation in chapter VDI Workloads Across the VDI production period, workloads of virtual desktops will experience great changes, including a number of explosive workloads (for example, power-on, shutdown, login, and virus scanning storms). This best practice discusses the following indispensable workloads during the VDI production period: login storm and steady state. A successful storage system for VDI deployments must meet the requirements of these types of workload. Boot storm and virus scanning, another two explosive workload states, can be avoided by using the VSA feature (reducing 70% reads), batch booting (booting desktops in batches), and separated peaks (scanning viruses at different periods). These measures greatly reduce the factors that need to be considered for storage planning. Therefore, these two states will not be discussed in this document. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 13

15 IOPS Best Practice of VMware Horizon View 5.3 VDI Based on HUAWEI OceanStor Series Login Storm When all users log in to their desktops simultaneously, the shared storage will experience an explosively heavy workload. This phenomenon is known as login storm. Unlike a boot storm, a login storm occurs when users start working simultaneously and, therefore, cannot be avoided. Figure 4-1 Average IOPS of desktops druing login 60 Average desktop IOPS druing login Avg. Writes/s Avg. Reads/s 10 0 Virtual Desktop The preceding figure shows the average IOPS per desktop during login Steady State Steady state indicates a state with a small workload fluctuation when all users use their desktops simultaneously. The workloads in a steady state vary depending on user type. The workload types in a steady state will be detailed in section 4.4 "User Types." Compared with explosive workload states during VDI production, a steady state occurs for the longest time and imposes the lowest performance requirement. If explosive workloads can be handled properly, storage performance planning only requires performance planning for the steady state. 4.3 OceanStor Carrying Workloads VDI workload analysis and verification experiment in section 4.2 "VDI Workloads" show that the large cache capacity of the OceanStor is a solution to the login storm. For details about the test environment and the test results, see the appendix. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 14

16 IOPS Best Practice of VMware Horizon View 5.3 VDI Based on HUAWEI OceanStor Series Figure 4-2 Average IOPS of 1000 VMs during login in different configurations Average IOPS of 1000 VMs during login Original Using VSA Using OceanStor As shown in the preceding figure, the OceanStor reduces the average IOPS upon a login storm to a stable level. Therefore, the VDI storage performance must be designed based on the type of users if the OceanStor is used. 4.4 User Types Collecting information on user types is a key step for understanding VDI system requirements. This best practice discusses the workloads of office desktops only. Table 4-1 distinguishes between different workloads and associates user types with empirical IOPS values, based on data collected in Huawei's lab tests. Table 4-1 Mapping between user types and IOPS User Type Task (light workload) Knowledge (heavy workload) Description Task-type users are typically engaged in data recording and paperwork, using Outlook, Excel, Word, and Web browsers (Internet Explorer or Firefox) to complete routine tasks. Knowledge-type users have comprehensive knowledge. In addition to all tools used by task-type users, knowledge-type users need to process large-scale PowerPoint documents and perform other large file operations. Such users include business managers, management officers, and marketing engineers. IOPS of Each User 3 to 7 8 to 16 Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 15

17 Different types of uses in a steady state have different workloads. In addition to IOPS values as shown in the preceding table, their I/O ratios and I/O sizes of uses vary. For details about the workload characteristics, see section 4.6 "Performance Planning." Storage planning may start after the type of users is confirmed with customers. The following sections explain capacity and performance planning. 4.5 Capacity Planning This section describes data capacity planning. NL-SAS disks are the recommended media for storing user data. The following information must be considered for capacity planning: Actual available capacity of each disk Capacity overhead of RAID groups The necessity of thin LUN provisioning to address future data growth 4.6 Performance Planning Performance is the key factor in this best practice. Workloads of VDI in a steady state are mostly random small I/Os, and storage performance is mainly determined by the IOPS it supports. Therefore, this section chooses a RAID type based on an understanding of estimated disk performance, RAID performance overhead, and workload features of VDI in a steady state. Finally, the section calculates the number of disks enough to meet the performance requirements. After the user type is determined, the performance required by VDI in different configurations can be calculated. Then based on the performance requirement, formulas can be used to calculate the number of needed disks Disk Performance Table 4-2 Estimated IOPS of a single disk Disk Type Estimated IOPS 10k rpm SAS k rpm SAS 180 SSD (emlc) 3500 SSD (SLC) 5000 The preceding table shows the estimated IOPS values of different disks. The IOPS value indicates the performance of a disk assuming that it meets the latency requirement. As the Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 16

18 OceanStor in this document uses 2.5-inch 10k rpm SAS disks, the estimated IOPS of each disk is 150. Enterprises can choose different types of disk. The next version of this document will use the value-added features of the OceanStor and adds SSDs to the best practice RAID Performance After the type of needed disks is determined, it is necessary to learn about the IOPS consumption of different RAID Level. The IOPS consumption of RAID Level is caused by its write operations, as RAID working principles suggest. The following table shows the IOPS consumption of RAID Level. Table 4-3 IOPS consumption of RAID groups RAID Level RAID Penalty RAID 10 2 RAID 5 4 RAID 6 6 As shown in the preceding table, RAID 10 consumes the least IOPS while RAID 6 consumes the largest. The following table shows the percentages of writes and reads of VDI in a steady state based on a Login VSI benchmark test. Table 4-4 Percentages of I/O writes and reads in a steady state Read I/O Percentage (%) Write I/O Percentage (%) As shown in the table, the majority of workloads of VDI in a steady state are write requests. Therefore, using a storage system with a large cache capacity is expected to deliver low latency. The required IOPS can be easily calculated using the following formulas based on the information provided in Table 4-3 IOPS = (Target IOPS x Read I/O%) + ((Target IOPS x Write I/O %) x RAID Penalty) Formula 1 Based on information in Table 4-2, the required number of disks can be estimated using the following formula: Disks = IOPS / Estimated IOPS Formula 2 Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 17

19 Target IOPS equals the average IOPS (shown in Table 4-1) of each user multiplied by the number of users. The values of Read I/O%, Write I/O%, and RAID Penalty are provided in Table 4-3 and Table 4-4. The value of Estimated IOPS is provided in Table 4-2. For the exemplification of how to use the formulas, see the next section. The calculated IOPS requirement is to be met by back-end disks, excluding the performance improvement of write hit and write cache. After the four-controller OceanStor enterprise storage system is used, the number of Disks can be reduced by over 60% Exemplification 1000 knowledge-type users (10 IOPS per user on average generated by the Login VSI benchmark workloads) use three types of RAID Level: RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10. The required performance for each type of RAID Level can be calculated using Formula 1. RAID-5: IOPS = (1000 x 10 x 10%) + (1000 x 10 x 90%) x 4 = 1, ,000 = 37,000 RAID-6: IOPS = (1000 x 10 x 10%) + (1000 x 10 x 90%) x 6 = 1, ,000 = 55,000 RAID-10: IOPS = (1000 x 10 x 10%) + (1000 x 10 x 90%) x 2 = 1, ,000 = 19,000 The bold figures in the preceding equations show how much storage performance is consumed by write I/Os. The number of required disks for the 1000 users can be calculated by using the IOPS values and Formula 2. RAID-5: 10K RPM SAS Disks=37,000/150=245 15K RPM SAS Disks=37,000/180=206 RAID-6: 10K RPM SAS Disks=55,000/150=367 15K RPM SAS Disks=55,000/180=306 RAID-10: 10K RPM SAS Disks=18,000/150=120 15K RPM SAS Disks=18,000/180=100 As shown by the preceding example, random write I/Os consume the majority of performance. In particular, write I/Os of RAID Level have serious performance consumption. Therefore, choosing the right RAID level is critical to storage performance planning. Based on the exemplification, Huawei recommends that customers use high-reliability and high-performance RAID 10 as the RAID level of storage pools on the OceanStor when deploying a number of VMware View linked clone desktops, if the preconditions described in this document are met. The prerequisite in this example is that system disk capacity will not become bottleneck. This best practice uses inch 10k rpm SAS disks to provide storage space for 1000 knowledge-type users. See details about the test results, see the appendix. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 18

20 5 Implementation of Best Practice 5.1 Overview This chapter describes how to configure storage performance after the storage performance design is completed. It includes configurations on the storage side and application side. 5.2 Best Practice on the Storage Storage is the basis for VMware Horizon View implementation. This section describes the best practice of deploying a desktop pool based on Horizon View linked clone for knowledge-type users. The OceanStor uses 2.5-inch 10k SAS disks and FC protocol. The configuration on the storage side mainly involves the allocation of storage resources to hosts. Log in to the OceanStor DeviceManager. For details, refer to the OceanStor manual. Then complete the following configuration: Figure 5-1 Resource allocation flowchart In the preceding flowchart, a configuration dialog box is displayed after each operation icon is clicked. The next section explains the items in the flowchart and the optimum configuration. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 19

21 5.2.1 Creating Disk Domains A disk domain is a group of some or all disks in a storage system. These disks are consolidated into one logical domain with reserved hot spare space to provide storage resources for storage pools in a unified manner. The OceanStor can have one or multiple disk domains. Multiple storage pools can be created using the storage resources of one disk domain. Disks in one disk domain can be of the same or different types (SSD, SAS, and NL-SAS). Faults, performance, and storage resources of one disk domain are separated from those of other domains. This best practice uses 2.5-inch 10k SAS disks to provide storage space for virtual desktops. As user data storage requires modest performance and large capacity, NL-SAS disks are recommended. This best practice is implemented without using any value-added feature of the OceanStor If the storage tiering feature is required for VDI architecture acceleration, refer to the next version of best practice. For details about determining the number of disks, refer to section 4.6 "Performance Planning." This section describes the best practice for disk domain configuration. Operating system disks and user data disks must come from different disk domains to facilitate management and maintenance. As the OceanStor with four controllers is used, ensure that the number of disks is a multiple of 48 to balance the performance of each controller. Distribute expansion disk enclosures to two engines (two controllers per engine) for balanced performance Creating Storage Pools A storage pool is a container of storage resources, which are used by all application servers. One storage pool is created based on a specified disk domain, which can dynamically allocate resources to the storage pool. The storage pool provides applications with storage resources that have RAID protection based on the RAID policy of each storage tier. A storage tier is a set of storage media that has similar performance in a storage pool. Storage tiers are used to manage storage media with different performance and provide appropriate storage space for applications that have diversified performance requirements. A storage pool can be divided into several tiers based on the types of disk it contains. When creating a storage pool from a disk domain, specify the storage pool's tier, RAID policy, and storage capacity can be specified. The OceanStor series supports RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10. As the capacity tier consists of large-capacity NL-SAS disks, the recommended RAID level is RAID 6 because it provides two parity check mechanisms. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 20

22 The best practice of creating a system disk pool for VDI desktops is as follows: Choose RAID 10 and use the minimum number of disks necessary to provide high performance. For details about calculating the number of disks, see section "Exemplification" Creating LUNs A LUN is a storage unit that can be directly mapped to a host for data reads and writes. The best practice of creating LUNs for system disks of VDI desktops is as follows: When creating LUNs, do not enable SmartThin. 4 x N LUNs (N is an integer) can be created, each allocated 600 GB of storage space. Figure 5-2 Creating LUNs Each LUN carries a maximum of 128 VMs, as recommended by VMware. Configure the advanced properties for the LUNs and set the prefect policy to No Prefetch. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 21

23 Figure 5-3 Configuring advanced properties Do not enable SmartThin unnecessarily for the LUNs used by system disks. It is recommended that SmartThin be enabled for user data disks to improve storage flexibility. Creating 4 x N LUNs can evenly allocate the LUNs to the four controllers for the purpose of load balancing. As mentioned in Chapter 4 "Best Practice of VDI Storage Design", VDI workloads are mostly random I/Os. Therefore, it is recommended that the prefetch policy be disabled Creating Hosts and Host Groups This function allows users to create and manage hosts so that the hosts can use the storage resources allocated by the storage system. To easily manage hosts, a host group can be created, which is similar to VMware cluster management. The best practice of creating hosts and a host group for VDI is as follows: When creating a host, name it after the ESXi host name or the host IP address for easy management and maintenance. When creating a host, set OS to VMware ESX. After creating a host, modify its initiator and add ALUA support. When creating a host group, match it with a VMware cluster and name it after the cluster name for easy management and maintenance. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 22

24 Figure 5-4 Modifying an initiator Creating Port Groups Creating and managing a port group allow a specified host group and LUN group to use the ports in the port group to communicate with the storage system. The best practice of creating a port group for VDI is as follows: Add all ports that are connected to VDI hosts to a host group for simplified deployment and management. Front-end ports connected to hosts are 8 Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports. It is recommended that each controller has at least two front-end ports for redundancy. VMware recommends that 1 Gbit/s storage bandwidth be provided for each 100 VMs Creating Mapping Views A mapping view enables users to flexibly allocate storage resources to hosts. The best practice of configuring a mapping view for VDI is as follows: Add a port group to connect a group of LUNs to a group of hosts. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 23

25 Figure 5-5 Creating a mapping view Select the corresponding objects in the red boxes in the preceding figure Configuring VAAI As a vsphere API of VMware, VAAI offloads storage operations to supported storage arrays for high performance and efficiency. The OceanStor in this best practice supports VAAI to reduce usage of CPU, memory, and storage bandwidth for higher performance and lower costs. The efficiency can be improved in the following scenarios: VM cloning, VM migration, and VM power-on and power-off. By default, VAAI is enabled on the OceanStor Best Practice on the Application This chapter describes the best practice of configuring VMware Horizon View based on the planning in this document and Huawei's experience. The configuration involves multipathing, VMware clusters, datastores, and VM templates Configuring Multipathing This best practice uses FC SAN to provide storage resources and redundant FC switches to provide multiple paths between hosts and the OceanStor Therefore, multipathing software must be used to select the best path. The best practice is to connect to each ESXi host through SSH and run the following command: Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 24

26 esxcli storage nmp satp rule add --satp=vmw_satp_alua --vendor= HUAWEI --description "OceanStor 18800" esxcli storage nmp satp set --default-psp=vmw_psp_fixed --satp VMW_SATP_ALUA reboot As the multipathing software designed for VMware EXSi is still being verified by VMware, this best practice recommends that customers combine the ALUA protocol and built-in multipathing software of VMware to select the best path Creating Clusters Note the following when configuring a cluster: If HA is enabled, ensure that the cluster has sufficient cluster resources and provide at least one more host for switchover. If DRS is enabled, provide a dedicated channel for vmotion. The latest Horizon View Composer supports up to 32 clustered hosts, whereas previous versions support Creating VM Templates Because this best practice assumes that the desktop users are knowledge-type users, ensure the following when creating and configuring a VM template: Set VM hardware version to 10. SE Sparse virtual disks can be used to improve disk utilization. If memory resources are sufficient, reserve at least 1 GB memory for each VM to prevent a waste of storage space Configuring View Storage Accelerator and Space Reclamation If a linked clone desktop pool is deployed, the following information can be checked on View Administrator. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 25

27 Figure 5-6 Configuring the host cache size and space reclamation for vcenter Server The configuration procedure is as follows: Step 1 On View Administrator, set a host cache size for the VMware vcenter Server. Log in to VMware View Administrator, and choose View Configuration > Server > vcenter Server. Set the host cache size to 2048 MB, as shown in Figure 5-6. Step 2 When adding a linked clone desktop pool, select Use host caching and use it for operating system disks, as shown in the following figure: Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 26

28 Figure 5-7 Enabling host caching ----End As shown in Figure 5-7, a time range can be selected for host caching to avoid host resource contention during peak hours. Select the time range based on service requirements. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 27

29 6 Summary Based on Huawei's VMware VDI test experience, this document introduces several methods of configuring storage and applications for virtual desktops. All these methods can help customers flexibly design the architecture to save costs, improve storage performance and utilization, and enhance storage reliability. This document is not the most authoritative implementation or solution guide. It requires professional expertise to resolve specific VDI deployment problems. If you have such problems, you may contact Huawei's representatives in your region to meet Huawei's VMware solution experts. For any comment on the document, please contact the author by . Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 28

30 7 Appendix Introduction to the 1000 Users Verification Test Network Diagram Figure 7-1 Network diagram for the 1000 users verification test Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 29

31 As shown in the preceding figure, Cluster A and Cluster B carry the desktop production environment and they each connect to four OceanStor controllers. Software and Hardware Configurations Hardware Configuration Device Type Quantity Function Configuration Tecal BH622 V2 2 x GE Switch Module NX112 HUAWEI Tecal E6000 H 2 Provides a computing cluster to carry virtual desktops 2 x 8 Gbit/s FC Module NX220 2 x Intel Xeon CPU GHz 192 GB RAM 1 GE Network Card 600 GB SAS Local Disk HUAWEI OceanStor (4 controllers) Provides high-reliabi lity and high-perfor mance shared storage resources for virtual desktops HUAWEI Tecal RH2288 V2 with Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2660, 2.20 GHz, 96 GB RAM QLogic ALE2562-PCIE 8 Gbit/s FC x4 Software version: C00SPC100B017 Storage array cache size: 192 GB (per controller) 48 x 2.5-inch 10k rpm SAS disks Software Configuration Component Software Version Virtualization infrastructure VMware vsphere (VMware ESXi) Virtualization management software VMware vcenter Virtualization desktop software VMware Horizon View build Workload testing tool View Planner 3.0 Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 30

32 Introduction to Login VSI Test results Login Virtual Session Indexer (Login VSI) is the industry standard load testing tool for virtualized desktop environments. Login VSI can be used to test the performance and scalability of VMware Horizon View, Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) or any other Windows based virtual desktop solution. Login VSI enables you to test, compare and validate the performance of different software and hardware solutions in your own environment. This helps you to make educated and objective decisions. Leading industry analysts recognize Login VSI as the de-facto industry standard testing and benchmarking tool for VDI and SBC. Figure 7-2 Test results of 1000 users with medium workloads The preceding figure shows that using Login VSI to carry the medium workloads easily passed the benchmark test of 1000 users. Huawei Proprietary and Confidential Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 31

33 Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Trademark Notice HUAWEI, and are trademarks or registered trademarks of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Other trademarks, product, service and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners. General Disclaimer The information in this document may contain predictive statements including, without limitation, statements regarding the future financial and operating results, future product portfolio, new technology, etc. There are a number of factors that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the predictive statements. Therefore, such information is provided for reference purpose only and constitutes neither an offer nor an acceptance. Huawei may change the information at any time without notice. HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD. Huawei Industrial Base Bantian Longgang Shenzhen , P.R. China Tel: