Silos, or portions of IT infrastructures or applications that exist on their own, have long been a headache for IT professionals as separate management, back up and maintenance tasks are often necessary to support each silo due to their lack of integration with the rest of the IT process. Deploying a new server and/or application is relatively easy (just like it is to add new VMs) and before you know it, your datacenter is inefficient, expensive and extremely difficult to manage. These are the difficulties virtualization promised to address and now, so too does the “cloud.”

What users don’t quite understand is that the cloud provides an excellent platform for better utilization, application integration and data sharing. But unless it is planned well, it could end up being just as complex as your standard datacenter – with lots of individual silos.

One of the big issues we often hear from customers is that they have to pay a lot of maintenance fees to keep their applications and silos alive under the presumption “why fix something that is not broken?”, as well as the current need to move to a proprietary cloud platform and port their applications.

The reality is… customers could realize significant cost savings by utilizing cloud infrastructures, while reducing management costs by optimizing their applications to take advantage of the liquid cloud platform vs. the silos they have today.

Sanbolic offers organizations the ability to create highly scalable, highly available public/private cloud infrastructures build on Microsoft Windows Server platforms. This allows customers to take their existing applications such as SQL, SharePoint, Web serving, File Serving, and VDI, and optimize their IT operations, integrations and data sharing by moving them to the cloud using their native OS.

 

Hi all,

It’s me again. Last week, I submitted a blog on the Citrix Community blogs site that I wanted you to know about. It describes the value-add Sanbolic Melio2010 brings to Citrix virtual solutions, i.e., enhancing their performance, scalability, manageability and availability. I also included references to several papers that you should find helpful, particularly if you are in the early planning and design phases of deploying Citrix solutions such as XenDesktop and/or XenApp that will be provisioned on-demand via Citrix Provisioning Services.

To visit the blog, click here: http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2010/08/12/Enhancing+Citrix+XenDesktop+and+XenApp+with+Sanbolic+Melio+2010

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Andy

 

Attention VARs!!!

Are you currently in the planning and/or design phases of building a highly scalable and highly available XenDesktop virtual desktop infrastructure?

Are you planning to take advantage of the performance, scalability and reliability capabilities of SAN storage to store the virtual images (VHDs) that will be streamed to virtual machines hosting the desktops?

Are you spending a lot of time trying to find the best way to ensure that the infrastructure achieves the highest levels of performance, scalability, availability and manageability in order to realize the greatest return on your investment?

If so, please take a few minutes to read the following white paper: http://www.sanbolic.com/pdfs/HA_Options_for_Citrix_Virtual_Solutions.pdf.

This paper highlights the storage options most frequently considered by organizations looking to enable high availability for Provisioning Services™, or PVS™ (the underlying technology used to stream images on demand to virtual machines hosting virtual desktops).

Once you’ve finished reading the paper it will be obvious why, out of all the options available for enabling high availability for Provisioning Services, only Sanbolic Melio 2010 has proven to actually enhance Citrix XenDesktop!

Organizations that have deployed Citrix XenDesktop with Sanbolic Melio 2010 have achieved the following:

1. Simplified maintenance of vDisk images by consolidating all vDisks onto a single volume on SAN storage, with all vDisk changes available for streaming by multiple PVS Servers immediately, i.e., no need to replicate the vDisks to different PVS Servers to ensure vDisk consistency.

2. Enhanced I/O performance using stripe sets to leverage multiple storage controllers, caching and spindles, thereby improving the user experience.

3. Quick and seamless scale out by adding more PVS Servers or more storage resources on the fly, with little effort and no interruption in user productivity.

4. Enhanced utilization of storage resources to keep storage costs at a minimum.

5. Centralized management of storage resources as all physical disks are virtualized and managed from a single console that can be accessed locally or remotely.

6. Improved fault-tolerance via high availability of vDisks as well as the PVS database.

7. Protection for vDisks using VSS-based snapshots of shared volumes or individual vDisks, with the ability to mount snapshots on any PVS Server and browse through the snapshots quickly and easily via Explorer.exe.

If your interest in Sanbolic Melio 2010 is piqued by the information presented in the white paper and you’d like to see a live demonstration of how Melio 2010 enhances Citrix solutions, please contact us at sales@sanbolic.com and one of our sales representatives would be happy to schedule a demonstration for you.

For a more detailed look at how Sanbolic Melio 2010 optimizes Citrix XenDesktop, check out this paper: http://www.sanbolic.com/pdfs/Optimizing_Citrix_XenDesktop_VDI_Solutions_with_Sanbolic_Melio_2010.pdf, which explains how Melio 2010 enables the seamless scale-out of XenDesktop to allow organizations to extend the benefits of VDI to a larger percentage of their users.

To learn more about Sanbolic’s SAN-storage enhancing software, Melio 2010, please visit http://www.sanbolic.com. We’re confident you’ll see why Melio 2010 is the ideal choice for optimizing Citrix XenDesktop virtual desktop infrastructures.

And while you’re there, check out the many other solutions we enhance, such as scalable file and web-serving farms, highly available SQL Server clusters and enterprise-class server virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V.

Sanbolic – Building better solutions with virtual shared storage!

Cheers,

Andy

 

Howdy all,

It’s time for another exciting episode of… “What Sanbolic Melio 2010 can do for you!”

And it’s all right here in this white paper – http://www.sanbolic.com/pdfs/HA_Options_for_Citrix_Virtual_Solutions.pdf.

If you’re a distributor, reseller, systems integrator, or current or potential Citrix customer in the planning and design phases of deploying XenDesktop VDI and/or XenApp application delivery solutions, the information found in this paper couldn’t be more timely. This paper describes the storage options most frequently considered by organizations looking to achieve high availability for their virtual desktops and XenApp servers streamed from Provisioning Services. After reading through the paper, it should be fairly obvious that of all the options, only the Sanbolic Melio 2010 option offers organizations high availability for virtual desktops and XenApp servers as well as:

1. Simplified maintenance of vDisks by consolidating all vDisks onto a single volume on SAN storage.

2. Enhanced performance using stripe sets (leveraging multiple storage controllers, caching and addition spindles) to improve the user experience.

3. Quick and seamless scale out for XenDesktop and/or XenApp infrastructures, with little effort and no interruption in user productivity.

4. Enhanced utilization of storage resources, allowing organizations to save money on disk drives.

5. Protection for vDisks using VSS-based snapshots of shared volumes or individual vDisks.

If your interest in Sanbolic Melio 2010 is piqued by the information presented in the white paper and you’d like to see a live demonstration of how Melio 2010 enhances these solutions, please contact us at sales@sanbolic.com and one of our sales representatives would be happy to schedule a demonstration for you.

Cheers,

Andy

Hello all,

Andy here. As many of you have probably noticed while reading through recent technology articles, attending events or speaking with colleagues around the water cooler, it seems virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, has become quite the attention grabber lately, with all sorts of pundits touting both the pros and cons of virtualizing desktops.

In keeping with the latest trends, I thought it would be a good idea to take a few minutes to explain how Sanbolic’s Melio 2010 product suite enhances one of the more prominent VDI solutions currently on the market today, Citrix Systems’ XenDesktop. So let’s get to it!

About Citrix XenDesktop

Citrix XenDesktop is a comprehensive desktop delivery solution that allows organizations to extend the longevity of their current hardware, improve the return on their investments in new hardware and greatly simplify and enhance the management and delivery of desktops and applications. Using XenDesktop, organizations are able to manage and deliver hosted and streamed desktops throughout their enterprise environment on demand from a central console. Users can access virtual desktops (and any applications installed within the virtual desktops) running remotely on XenServer™ virtual machines and can access other applications running remotely on XenApp™ servers or streamed to their local devices.

As organizations consider the numerous benefits afforded by the rapid and dynamic delivery of desktops and applications and contemplate the migration of their current desktop infrastructure to this new desktop delivery paradigm, the folllowing key aspects of the solution should be thoroughly scrutinized.

Performance – Will users experience the same levels of desktop and application performance that they experienced using their local desktops?

The performance of hosted desktops and applications must be optimized to ensure that, from the user’s perspective, there are no discernable differences from desktops and applications running on their local machines.

Scalability / Scale-out - Will there be an easy way to build up and build out the virtual desktop and application delivery infrastructures as the needs of an organization continues to grow?

There must be a way to quickly and seamlessly expand the virtual desktop and application delivery infrastructures to support more desktops, more servers and more applications without introducing additional administrative overhead and without affecting the user experience.

Business Continuity - Will user productivity be maintained during unexpected failures or outages?

The continuous availability of hosted/streamed desktops and applications as well as all essential virtual desktop and application delivery infrastructure components (i.e., XenDesktop Delivery Controllers, Web Interface and XenApp servers) must be ensured to maximize user productivity.

Manageability - Will it be easier or more difficult to manage desktops and applications?

The virtual desktop and application delivery infrastructures must provide a simple, cost-effective way to manage desktop images and applications (i.e., consolidation and centralized management).

Data Protection - Will there be an easy way to protect desktop and VDI component images, i.e., backup and recover all images?

There must be a simple and effective way to backup and recover images for hosted and streamed desktops as well as XenDesktop Delivery Controllers, Web Interface and XenApp servers.

Storage considerations for Citrix XenDesktop VDI solutions

The driving engine behind XenDesktop is Provisioning Services™, also known as PVS™, an essential infrastructure component of the VDI solution that is used to stream images (vDisks) to target devices (i.e., virtual machines hosting virtual desktops, physical machines and various other systems that serve as the fundamental building blocks of a XenDesktop VDI solution, including the XenDesktop Delivery Controllers, Web Interface and XenApp servers). To ensure target devices maintain continuous access to PVS vDisks, Provisioning Services includes a high availability (HA) component that requires all Provisioning Servers have access to the PVS datastore containing the vDisks. Providing multiple Provisioning Servers with simultaneous read and write access to the PVS datastore is best accomplished using shared storage.

While there are numerous shared storage options available to enable PVS HA, readers who refer to the Virtualization Infrastructure Design section of the Citrix Systems’ white paper “Designing an Enterprise XenDesktop Solution” will note that Fibre Channel SAN storage is proposed for the Provisioning Services Infrastructure (PSI), as well as for every other infrastructure defined within the XenDesktop VDI solution, including the XenDesktop, XenApp and Hosted Desktop infrastructures. In fact, the only infrastructure for which SAN storage is not proposed is the PVS Remote infrastructure, for which local storage on the Provisioning Servers themselves is suggested in order to minimize the number of components necessary to extend the benefits of the VDI solution to remote offices.

Although the use of SAN storage is suggested in order to optimize the XenDesktop infrastructure showcased in the Citrix white paper, SAN storage has an innate limitation whereby only one device can have read and write access to a logical unit number (LUN) at any time. This means that multiple Provisioning Servers would not be able to share a single LUN containing the PVS datastore to enable high availability for vDisks. In fact, the only way to garner the benefits of both SAN storage and shared storage is through the use of a cluster file system, which provides the locking mechanisms necessary to allow multiple devices to share simultaneous read and write access to a single LUN at all times.

Besides underscoring the storage aspect of a XenDesktop VDI solution, the Citrix white paper also places strong emphasis on ensuring the scalability of a XenDesktop VDI solution, highlighting the need for their conceptual environment of 8,000 hosted and streamed desktops to be able to scale so that new farms, resource pools and servers can all be integrated into the infrastructure quickly and seamlessly (refer to the Conceptual Architecture section of the white paper).

So how can organizations take advantage of the benefits of SAN storage (i.e., performance, scalability and reliability) to achieve the levels of performance, scalability, availability and manageability necessary to ensure the greatest return on their investments in a Citrix XenDesktop VDI solution?

Answer: Deploy a Citrix XenDesktop VDI solution with Sanbolic Melio 2010 SAN software and SAN storage.

Optimizing Citrix XenDesktop VDI solutions with Sanbolic Melio 2010 and SAN storage

Sanbolic Melio 2010 is a feature-rich product suite comprised of various applications designed to work together to share, simplify and enhance SAN storage. At the core of Melio 2010 is an advanced, all-purpose, 64 bit symmetrical cluster file system that allows multiple devices to share simultaneous read and write access to LUNs on SAN storage and a cluster volume manager that simplifies the management of Melio shared storage while providing advanced functionality such as the creation of volume sets and stripe sets to improve storage performance, as well as dynamic volume expansion.

Using Sanbolic Melio 2010 and SAN storage, organizations can achieve all of the key aspects necessary to optimize a Citrix XenDesktop VDI solution:

• High performance via block-based access to storage and dedicated I/O paths
• Scalability to add more desktops, servers and storage quickly and seamlessly
• High availability for PVS vDisks and PVS databases
• Centralized management of storage resources for PVS datastores
• Data protection in the form of VSS-based snapshots for backup and recovery of vDisks

Melio 2010 SAN software installs quickly and easily on the Provisioning Servers and works with industry-standard server and SAN hardware, allowing the servers to share concurrent read and write access to a single LUN containing the vDisks within minutes. And best of all, Melio 2010 does not introduce any of the complexities or constraints associated with file-based shared storage solutions that often have an adverse affect on system performance, scalability and availability.

For many organizations, it was only shortly after commencing with the test phase of a Citrix XenDesktop VDI solution that performance and scalability issues arose, stemming from the use of file-based shared storage to support the Provisioning Services Infrastructure. These organizations turned to Sanbolic to help them design a VDI solution that incorporated the use of shared SAN storage to address each of the key aspects emphasized in the Citrix white paper (i.e., performance, scalability, availability and manageability) in order to optimize the solution and ensure a faster and greater return on their XenDesktop investments.

Using file-based storage, organizations that attempted to provision additional virtual machines to expand their existing hosted desktop infrastructures often encountered performance degradation as a result of the locking contention issues incurred by CIFS and NFS in mid to larger size file-sharing environments and the shuttling of storage operations over the same network used for vDisk streaming. Implementing more Provisioning Servers to stream vDisks to additional desktops taxed the file-based storage and network infrastructure even further, making it extremely difficult, if not impossible to scale the VDI solution to meet future needs while maintaining the high levels of performance necessary to ensure a rich user experience.

Sanbolic Melio FS works with block-based storage and thus, does not rely on CIFS or NFS to access data. Dedicated I/O paths are established between each Provisioning Server and SAN storage via Fibre Channel or iSCSI, thereby offloading storage operations from the LAN. This approach allows organizations to quickly and seamlessly add more desktops and more servers to their hosted desktop and Provisioning Services infrastructures, respectively, without impacting system performance.

For other organizations testing XenDesktop with file-based shared storage solutions, it became apparent that individual failures of the components making up these storage solutions introduced the potential to cause wide-spread disruptions in user productivity, particularly when the vDisks were stored on a file share hosted by a single server or on a NAS device. Attempts to address the single points of failure associated with these solutions required the use of additional components and more complex configurations in the form of Windows Failover Clusters or clustered NAS devices, both of which had a negative impact on performance due to the additional traffic levels presented to the network infrastructure. In addition, the active/passive operational mode of Windows Failover Clustering had a significant effect on overall system performance as only one Provisioning Server was able to access the drive containing the vDisks at any given time. This prevented organizations from maximizing network throughput when multiple Provisioning Servers streamed vDisks to target devices in tandem as all other servers that did not have direct access to the drive containing the vDisks were forced to access the vDisks through the one server that did have direct access to the drive in order for the load-balancing feature of PVS HA to be leveraged.

Some organizations made other efforts to work around the single points of failure associated with file-based shared storage solutions by assigning a separate LUN to each Provisioning Server. However, this approach added significant overhead to the management of vDisks as every time a change was made to the contents of a vDisk, the updated vDisk had to be copied to each LUN in order to ensure that each Provisioning Server streamed the most current version of the vDisk to target devices. The ability to scale their XenDesktop infrastructures was also affected as every time a new Provisioning Server was added to support an increase in the number of devices, an additional LUN had to be created, forcing IT administrators to copy vDisks to a greater number of LUNs each time a change was made to the contents of a vDisk. Lastly, poor utilization of both network bandwidth (the updated vDisk had to be copied over the LAN between Provisioning Servers) and storage resources (more LUNs with relatively low utilization levels) were experienced with this approach.

Using high performance, highly scalable, highly available and easy-to-manage shared storage provided by Sanbolic Melio 2010 and SAN storage, these organizations were able to achieve all the key aspects of an optimized XenDesktop VDI solution. Block-based access and dedicated bandwidth to shared storage for solid performance; the ability to add more desktops and more Provisioning Servers to the hosted desktop and Provisioning Services infrastructures quickly and seamlessly; the ability to add more storage resources on the fly to expand storage capacity and improve I/O performance; increased system resiliency in the form of fault-tolerance for target devices as all Provisioning Servers maintain read and write access to both metadata and vDisks when one or more servers fails unexpectedly; simplified management of desktop and VDI component images as only one LUN is necessary to store all vDisks, with changes to the contents of vDisks automatically and immediately available to all Provisioning Servers; and image protection in the form of VSS-based snapshots, allowing IT administrators to backup and recover vDisks at any point in time.

In conclusion, deploying Citrix XenDesktop with Sanbolic Melio 2010 SAN software and SAN storage offers organizations a high performance, highly scalable, highly available and easy-to-manage virtual desktop solution that allows IT administrators to focus their time and energy on managing their virtual desktop infrastructures and not the backend storage responsible for optimizing the VDI solution.

I hope this installment proved useful in explaining how Sanbolic Melio 2010 enhances Citrix XenDesktop VDI solutions. As always, please let me know if you have any questions.

Andy