{"id":1001,"date":"2013-06-30T23:20:19","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T23:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.atumvirt.com\/?p=1001"},"modified":"2013-06-30T23:20:19","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T23:20:19","slug":"atlantis-ilio-diskless-vdi-an-alternative-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/2013\/06\/atlantis-ilio-diskless-vdi-an-alternative-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI – An Alternative Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Atlantis ILIO Overview<\/h1>\n

While at Synergy in Anaheim in May, one of the booths that garnered quite a bit of attention from attendees was that of Atlantis Computing<\/a>. \u00a0They were demonstrating ILIO, their VDI solution that ran a desktop at a rather remarkable speed. \u00a0ILIO comes in a variety of editions suitable for XenApp, persistent VDI, diskless VDI and what they call FlexCloud.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, ILIO utilizes RAM as primary storage for the applications. \u00a0In the context of VDI, this can mean a huge performance gain for the write-cache necessary to operate desktops. \u00a0The “magic” VDI number for IOPS has been (sometimes jokingly) stated as 15-20 IOPS. \u00a0Realistically, if you deliver only 15-20 IOPS to a Windows 7 user, they’ll probably riot. \u00a0The ILIO solution skirts that issue by using RAM as the primary storage. \u00a0But why would you use Atlantis when we’ve seen this type of solution<\/a> before? \u00a0The “secret sauce” lies in the fact that ILIO de-duplicates and compresses memory on the fly which dramatically increases scalability and makes the cost model for cache-in-RAM applications quite feasible.<\/p>\n

After our successful VDI pilot, our VDI environment expansion “target” was to expand VDI by as much as we could given the budget and other environment design goals we laid out. \u00a0Our core infrastructure consisted of 3 HP DL380 G7’s (144GB), \u00a01 HP DL380 G8 (192 GB) backed by an EMC VNX5500 block device serving ~4000 IOPS from spinning drives fronted by FAST Cache. \u00a0All told, this pilot environment was stable, dependable and worked quite well. \u00a0The trouble was expanding it was going to be somewhat expensive.<\/p>\n

Atlantis has an advantage with ILIO because the price of RAM has come down in recent years. \u00a0It is quite possible to pack servers with 256-384GB of RAM for easily less than $10,000. \u00a0Other than the additional RAM requirements, ILIO’s competitive price comes from being entirely software.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ILIO Diskless VDI for Hyper-V<\/h1>\n

Upon beginning our initial evaluation, I was met with the unfortunate reality that once again Hyper-V is “stuck in the IT-past” to paraphrase the now-defunct “VM-Limited” Tad. \u00a0Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI for Hyper-V does not have feature parity with the current version for ESX. \u00a0The ESX current version is 4.0, while Hyper-V is stuck at 3.2. \u00a0Atlantis was quick to point out that they are working tirelessly on Server 2012 support as well as making sure there is feature parity. \u00a0In addition, there is no ILIO Center for Hyper-V, meaning all ILIO instances need to be monitored individually. \u00a0This is key, because if the ILIO volume fills to capcity it is “game over”, so to speak.<\/p>\n

With that aside, the installation and configuration of ILIO was extremely simple. \u00a0ILIO presents its RAM storage as a 2-TB iSCSI LUN via an internal Hyper-V network to the Hyper-V host. \u00a0you then provision your VM’s to that storage and away you go. \u00a0If the ILIO VM powers off for any reason, all data on the volume is gone and you must reprovision the VM’s again after restoring ILIO.<\/p>\n

Performance<\/h2>\n

IOMeter and HD Tune were used to measure the I\/O performance and compare to our disk-based storage. \u00a0In a head-to-head test, our storage array actually won out in some write tests (likely due to the large controller cache then FAST Cache) but was consistently smoked in reads.<\/p>\n

\"Random<\/a> \"Random<\/a> \u00a0\"ILIO<\/a>\"File<\/a><\/p>\n

However, it is important to note that this took place when the storage system was basically idle. \u00a0At scale, our expansion will see a maximum of 770 desktops in concurrent usage. \u00a0Our storage expansion plans could offer us an additional 16,000 I\/O, to bring the total to 21,000. \u00a0ILIO, on the other hand, showed 25,000-28,000 IOPS maximum – a point that is key considering you will receive that I\/O ceiling\u00a0per host.<\/strong>\u00a0 With 10 servers, that means we’ll be pitting 250,000 IOPS potential vs 21,000.<\/p>\n

Recommendation<\/h1>\n

At this point the finalized pricing has yet to come in for our additional expansion components, however, we’ll be recommending obtaining Atlantis ILIO. \u00a0The peace-of-mind knowing that you’ll basically “always” have enough IOPS to deliver a killer VDI experience is a huge motivator, even given the drawbacks of their Hyper-V edition. \u00a0Given the aggressive positioning Microsoft has been doing with Hyper-V, I am hopeful vendors will start to see it as a serious competitor and grant an equal development priority to ensure their products truly can remain hypervisor agnostic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Atlantis ILIO Overview While at Synergy in Anaheim in May, one of the booths that garnered quite a bit of attention from attendees was that of Atlantis Computing. \u00a0They were demonstrating ILIO, their VDI solution that ran a desktop at a rather remarkable speed. \u00a0ILIO comes in a variety of editions suitable for XenApp, persistent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[86,96],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}