Branch Office Desktop

Transcription

1 Branch Office Desktop VMware View with Riverbed Steelhead EX + Granite HOW-TO GUIDE

2 Solution Overview Today, there are millions of branch offices worldwide that represent a significant management challenge for businesses and organizations. Centralizing the management of these environments through desktop virtualization is often seen as a good way to reduce costs while ensuring better levels of security and compliance. However, remote office virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments have often proven difficult to implement for a number of reasons: Small branches often have poor network connectivity and may not have sufficient bandwidth to support users accessing a wide range of applications. Local print and application servers, which are not often centralized with desktops in the datacenter, impede how quickly employees can access applications and data. WAN outages mean workers lose access to their desktops which is a huge productivity loss. Ensuring maximum uptime often means that customers need multiple WAN connections for redundancy, which can be costly. The VMware Branch Office Desktop solution augments a traditional VMware View design by including Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization appliances and Granite edge virtual server infrastructure technology. Granite projects datacenter resident storage to edge locations where the technology pins the datastore and performs accelerated asynchronous write-back to a centralized datacenter storage array. In this design The Granite datastore lives at the branch location and is available with local connectivity to local resources. A VMware vsphere server at the branch provides local compute power to serve virtual desktops, but is stateless and managed centrally, removing the need for local administration. The View management components run and are accessed within the datacenter, enabling IT to provision and control View desktops centrally. In the branch, the Steelhead EX + Granite appliance presents an iscsi storage target for the local vsphere host and all virtual machines come online with their configuration intact. Users connect to the View Connection server as they normally would, but establish a session with the local desktop so all PCoIP traffic stays within the branch office. With this design, the only View traffic crossing the WAN is the agent communication, which is optimized by the Steelhead appliance. Users gain additional benefit from WAN optimization through acceleration of the applications accessed inside the desktops that are centrally managed in the datacenter or outside of the local branch, delivering optimal performance. The Branch Office Desktop solution removes the heavy dependency on the WAN, including the fear of a network outage, as desktop users remain connected and are able to work with desktops and local applications even if the WAN goes down. 2

3 Architecture & Design In a typical deployment, the desktops for users at branch office locations are stored and executed from a central location. This leads to the challenges described earlier, primarily around bandwidth and latency. In the Riverbed and VMware View solution, the desktops for users at the branch are stored on a LUN in the central location. The Granite Core appliance at the datacenter projects this storage to the Granite Edge appliance at the branch office. The Granite Edge keeps a working set cache of these desktops locally at the branch and presents a storage target. Using a local vsphere host at the branch office, the storage can be mounted and the desktops can be run locally at the branch office. Figure 1: Validation Test Topology This technology enables you to provision and manage your View desktops centrally, and to project them to your remote office for local connectivity. This solution does not require you to replicate any of the View management components, although you can also replicate any server applications that could benefit from running locally in the branch. The vsphere server at the branch location is headless and is managed via the Steelhead appliance so there is no local administration of either device. The Steelhead appliance presents itself as an iscsi target for the vsphere host and all virtual machines come online with their configuration intact. 3

4 Users connect to the View Connection server as they normally would but end up establishing a session with the local desktop so all PCoIP traffic stays within the branch office. The only View traffic crossing the WAN is the agent communication that will be optimized via the Steelhead. All applications accessed inside their desktops that require resources centrally or outside of the local branch can also be optimized over the Steelhead for optimal performance. This solution removes the heavy dependency on the WAN and also the fear of a network outage as the desktop users will remain connected and will be able to work on any application that does not require resources outside of the branch if the WAN goes down. The solution also provides benefits by lowering your costs on central storage. Since the desktops at the branch office are not fronted on Granite, users accessing heavy read/write workloads (boot storms) will be hitting the Granite Edge appliance. The Granite appliance trickles these IOPS in a steady-state fashion back to the central storage. The central storage no longer needs to be sized for peak desktop operations and can be scaled down for such deployments. 4

5 Validation Result Validation testing for the Branch Office Desktop solution focused both on capability as well as performance. The combined VMware and Riverbed solution is designed to reduce and in most cases eliminate the impact of low-bandwidth, high-latency WANs on the operation of VMware View in edge locations. Figure 2: Application Response Comparisons Figure 2 above shows the application performance improvement when deploying View with Granite in comparison to the traditional PCoIP across the WAN. The results clearly show a 2X to 4X improvement in application response times over the traditional deployment model. 5

6 Figure 3 below shows the storage IOPS savings between a traditional VDI deployment in comparison to the Granite deployment. In a traditional deployment, all remote desktops hit the central storage during a boot or other read/write intensive task. As shown below, with 30 desktops the central storage see 833 write and 1,295 read, a total of more than 2,100 IOPS during a boot process. With Granite, the same process generated only 343 write and no read IOPS since Granite is fronting the desktops at the branch location. Again, this translates to a 7X reduction in IOPS on the central storage, providing a huge cost savings. Figure 3: Disk Performance Comparisons (IOPS) The Riverbed solution for distributed View environments addresses some key concerns. The benefits include WAN Connectivity - LAN performance while accessing the desktops - Bandwidth savings by completely eliminating PCoIP over the WAN - Disconnected operations during WAN outages - Steelheads accelerate all application traffic from the branch Reduced Cost of Centralized Storage - Lower SAN IOPS requirements read/write bursts absorbed locally - Centralized storage can be tiered down Other Benefits - Branch consolidation and disaster recovery are built in - Peripherals are supported on the LAN 6

7 Design Components VMware vsphere and VMware vcenter The Branch Office Desktop solution is built on top of vsphere, the industry-leading virtualization platform. VMware vcenter automates operations management for virtual and cloud infrastructure. VMware View VMware View modernizes desktops and applications by moving them into the cloud and delivering them as a managed service. With VMware View and VMware ThinApp IT has the ability to grant or restrict access to desktops, data, and applications based on endpoint device configuration, network location, and user identity. Riverbed Steelhead EX Steelhead EX appliances combine WAN optimization and server virtualization to enable organizations to both deliver performance for centralized applications and also to effectively host services required in the branch. Steelhead appliances deliver the industry-first ability to identify, classify, and deliver fine-grained control for PCoIP traffic streams to ensure high-performance, predictable delivery of virtual desktop data to edge locations over wide area networks. Steelhead technology provides LAN-like access to centralized data and applications, improving performance of commonly used applications across the network, typically by 5 50 times and, in some cases, by up to 100 times. Riverbed Granite Riverbed Granite edge virtual server infrastructure enables IT organizations to project centralized storage and virtual servers including VMware View from the datacenter to the branch office, delivering local LAN speed access to virtual desktops while ensuring a streamlined, secure way for IT to centrally control and protect resources. The Granite solution helps organizations ensure a return on investment for VDI in distributed environments. IT organizations no longer have to make trade-offs between management and performance and are able to effectively manage, patch, and back up the VDI environment at the datacenter. The Granite solution seamlessly extends datacenter storage to distributed operations enabling IT to fully consolidate branch servers, desktops, applications, and data to the datacenter yet deliver required services to the edge as if they were local. 7

8 Riverbed Riverbed Technology, Inc. 199 Fremont Street San Francisco, CA Tel: (415) VMware VMware Inc 3401 Hillview Ave Palo Alto, CA USA Tel: Riverbed Technology Ltd. One Thames Valley Wokingham Road, Level 2 Bracknell. RG42 1NG United Kingdom Tel: Riverbed Technology Pte. Ltd. 391A Orchard Road #22-06/10 Ngee Ann City Tower A Singapore Tel: Riverbed Technology K.K. Shiba-Koen Plaza Building 9F 3-6-9, Shiba, Minato-ku Tokyo, Japan Tel: VMware, Inc Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA USA Tel Fax Copyright 2012 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc., in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMW-HG-RIVERBED-BOD WEB 8