3PAR Thin Copy Desktop Brings VMware VDI One Step Closer to Reality

It's hard to talk about data center consolidation without the topic of server virtualization and VMware popping up somewhere in the conversation. Nearly every company I talk to is testing or using VMware somewhere in-house and looking to expand its adoption of VMware in 2009. But companies may still start and stop their virtualization conversation with enterprise servers.

Despite the server sprawl that most companies are looking to deal with, a more insidious problem that they also recognize that they need to deal with is corporate desktop management. Companies may have thousands or even tens of thousands of desktops in-house and while the hardware costs for these desktops have become fairly nominal, the soft costs of configuring and supporting them mount. Add in the hidden costs of accessing and searching the data on these desktops should companies find themselves subject to an eDiscovery request and the costs of desktop management can quickly escalate to match or even exceed that of server management.

Yet the problems of implementing desktop virtualization are equally subtle. Desktop virtualization has never really achieved corporate adoption for one simple reason - a cost-effective, highly available, highly scalable back-end infrastructure. In this case, the nominal cost of desktops has worked against the adoption of technologies like VMWare's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) because of the up-front investment in backend infrastructure required to make virtual desktops a reality.

The new Thin Copy Desktop feature on the 3PAR InServ Storage Server coupled with its existing Thin Provisioning and Virtual Copy features disrupt this mindset in a number of ways and make the wide-scale deployment of VMware VDI feasible for companies in the following ways:

• Runs on 3PAR InServ Storage Server - a highly available storage system. An unspoken reason that companies remain dependent on desktops is that if one desktop fails, only the person using that desktop is affected. Conversely, if the backend storage infrastructure has a hiccup or goes down, tens, hundreds or even thousands of desktops are immediately impacted - a situation that is far worse from an IT perspective than the failure of a single desktop. The 3PAR InServ Storage Server addresses this concern by providing five 9's of availability so that the possibility of a system failure and corporate-wide impact is for all practical purposes completely removed.
• Eliminates over provisioning. Large hard disk drives (HDDs) of 80 GB+ on desktops serve another subtle purpose - users rarely run out of capacity which eliminates the even more undesirable need for HDD upgrades on desktops. 3PAR's use of thin provisioning and thin copy on its InServ Storage Servers provides the benefits of large HDDs on local PCs without the drawbacks. HDDs on enterprise storage systems are more expensive but when thinly provisioned, as is done using the InServ Storage Server, companies only need to allocate as much capacity to the desktop as it needs. Since most users only use a fraction of the capacity of their desktops, keeping the data on the InServ Storage Server does not add more costs but actually lowers costs while centralizing desktop data stores.
• Rapid provisioning of virtual desktops. Utilities like Ghost are routinely used to make and copy golden images of desktops from server to server. 3PAR improves upon this technique with its Thin Copy Desktop script. A golden image (including OS, Apps and sysprep) of each VM is created in a VMware template. The Thin Copy Desktop script then discovers this template, creates copies or snapshots of it, and presents them back to the VMware ESX Cluster which then discovers the new VDI VMs. The desktops are then assigned for end-user access.
• Provides adaptive caching. Every morning hundreds or thousands of desktops boot up at approximately the same time. While this is not a big deal when each one boots from a local HDD, it can put tremendous strain plus slow performance when this boot image resides on a central storage system. The 3PAR InServ Storage Server accounts for this daily load by placing a boot image in its cache and giving each virtual desktop access to that image. Performed in this manner the boots occur just as fast, if not faster, as booting from a local HDD.

Virtualizing the desktop infrastructure is an objective that many corporations have desired for years though limitations and deficiencies in the corporate infrastructure have precluded them from pursuing this objective. The combination of 3PAR's InServ Storage Server and VMware's VDI now makes such a reality possible and justifiable - both technically and economically. As it does, it changes the conversation around desktop virtualization from a "nice-to-have" feature that is often impractical to implement to making it a viable and realistic virtualization option.