VMware Horizion View

[Quick Post] – VMware View KB List

March 16, 2015 by Nathan Byrne Leave a Comment

Having taken a little (unintentional) break from blogging I found an article that I just wanted to share.

The guys over at the Support Insider blog have written a list of 50 articles that “fix everything in Horizon View”

If like me you are swamped and stuck for time, having one quick link to go to for all the articles may be of real use so here you go.

If you have not already, add these guys to your reading list. Many a time I have been sat in a View health check meeting, have been described “the problems” and been able to count the articles in my head from here that have helped me.

Thanks

Cloud Pod – Enabling the Future

November 10, 2014 by Nathan Byrne Leave a Comment

Cloud Pod – Enabling The Future

As mentioned in my previous blog, I am going to drill down into a few technologies that are enabling VDI. I will try to keep them from being a deep dive but as you can imagine some of the explanations will inevitably be Tech Talk.

One of the recent developments in the VDI space was VMwares announcement of Cloud Pod. It took up quite a bit of VMwares premier event VMWorld and has generated a lot of attention within their Technical Blogs. [Read more…]

Nimble Storage – Antivirus Attacks & Nimble Knows Better

June 14, 2014 by Nathan Byrne Leave a Comment

I had the opportunity on a recent project to deploy a Nimble 220G X2 as part of a Horizon View VDI Infrastructure.

As part of smoke testing I agreed with the customer that I wanted to try and break the storage layer as generally speaking this is one area where VDI most tends to present stresses on the infrastructure.

During the design process of VDI one of the most commonly covered design aspects is Antivirus and the workload it can place on the storage. As this had been left on their base build (and we would be going through a new image soon) we deployed the image to see what measurable impact it would have.

The pool workload was around 5 – 6k IOPS when completing initial pools and settling below that during use. This was a pool of around 290 Windows 7 VM with around 30% in use.

When Antivirus ran at 1PM there was a difference of over 12k IOPS, if this was extrapolated over the full size deployment this would have been around 25K IOPS

While there was some free time on the project I completed some additional testing with the Nimble unit and on the hosts.

I managed to get the IOPS up to around 21K, pulled a controller, a network cable, and even failed one of the switches and the storage just kept on trucking.

The end result was the VDI was deployed on time, and if there had been a snag list the storage would not have been on it!

Nimble says no!

One little side note of a feature I did find rather clever, was when I came to do a firmware upgrade at the install time.

During the firmware upgrade I tried to cheat a little and just get enough network connectivity to work, as the storage was not yet in use and full networking was not available.

As the Nimble knew it would have to failover, and knew that my configuration was not failover capable, it would not allow me to complete the firmware.

A little thing, but again with this storage I find it’s those little friendly design decisions that make the unit a true pleasure to work with.