Tag Archives: HCI

SimpliVity: The all inclusive HCI solution gets even better!

By | | ,
Leave a comment

Its been a while since I’ve wrote about SimpliVity, and while I may not be there anymore, I still like to stay up to date.  Today, SimpliVity announces some great enhancements that really build in the areas that really count.

SimpliVity RapidDR

When i was doing demo’s of the OmniStack software, there were 4 aspects of the built in data protection that i would always show off: Backup, Restore, Clone, and Move.  While these make up the basic components of a disaster recovery plan, what was lacking was the automation piece.  Enter RapidDR.

RapidDR provides the automation and work flows that tie all the data protection functionality together and deliver a truly comprehensive solution.  Now users can schedule power on order, network and resource changes, as well as external scripts to run as part of a simple wizard.  RapidDR will utilize Simplivity’s built in rapid restore technology to get customers up and running with a useable VM and thus reducing the amount of time it takes to recover from an incident.

SimpliVity RapidDR

This enhancement also improves compliance as well.  All the scripts and recovery steps are self documenting to help improve compliance and understanding, and cut down on the time and complexity of manually building run books.

MS SQL specific backups

While application aware backups had been a part of SimpliVity since the initial version, i noticed often that customers would stack it with another SQL specific backup product to get all the functionality they needed.  Now, with additional enhancements, those are a thing of the past.  Now, when you backup a SQL server, you can do things like log truncation.  And when you restore the VM, it will run through the entire restore and bring SQL server back to a running configuration, rather than having to restore the database from within.

SimpliVity All Flash Node

Saving the best for last, this has been something I’ve been waiting for since day 1 at SimpliVity.  If you thought OmniStack was fast before, wait till it’s loaded up with flash.  This update replaces the spinning disk with 1.6TB Intel SSDs.  These nodes will come in equivalent specs to the larger nodes as far as CPU, RAM, and storage, while delivering up to 5x increased performance.  As already validated by the AFA market, adding flash is a great way to keep up with the demands of an ever expanding environment and deliver predictable performance.  Combine that with the rest of the enhancements already offered and you have a very robust datacenter in a box.

SimpliVity All Flash Node

Conclusion

As a presales engineer, its clear that product management has been listening to feedback as these 3 were highly requested features and I’m glad to see them being brought to market as early as Q4 2016 (aka next quarter).  If you are attending VMworld, be sure to stop by the booth and check this out.  And if you are attending the show, drop me a line in the comments and lets meet up!

Turning VDI up to 11!

By | | ,
Leave a comment

11It’s an exciting time in the world of HCI.  More and more people are starting to realize the benefits of consolidating their environments down to a smaller footprint.  Today, SimpliVity is taking that a step further and cranking up VDI density to 11!  Building on the momentum of the OmniStack 3.0 release, a new software update greatly improves the time to deployment and performance of VDI workloads while maintaining predictable results as you scale.  While you can read the full announcement here, I want to highlight a few of the results:

  • 1000 linked clones in 4 nodes
  • 1000 desktops in 70 minutes
  • 1000 logins in 1000 seconds

These are some pretty bold claims, and to back that up, they are all validated by LoginVSI benchmarks!

1000 linked clones in 4 nodes

So before I dive into these claims, a little background information about the environment.  These tests were performed on the all new OmniCube CN-2400 platform.  This platform give a 15%-20% boost over the CN-2200 and brings the Intel Haswell chipset to a lower cost solution.  As with all the OmniCube offerings, RAM and CPU are adjustable to fit your needs.  CN-24004 of the CN-2400s were placed in a cluster and each were given 384 gigs of ram.  As for the different type of VMs used, they were based on the industry standards for Task Worker, Office Worker, and Knowledge Worker.  Using Windows 7 64 bit, they were given 1 gig of ram, 1.5, and 2 gigs respectively.  So lets take a look at the first claim.  Loading 1000 desktops into this size of an environment delivers unheard of density in the HCI space.

1000 desktops in 70 minutes

One of the major stresses on a VDI environment is the amount of time it takes to provision desktops.  Whether you are deploying a new OS, refreshing the existing image after an update, or bringing up your environment after a disaster, users don’t want to have to wait around to get access to their work, and likewise administrators don’t want to spend all night doing maintenance (IT admins need sleep too!).

1000 linked clones in 70 minutes

As you can see from the graph above, the number of linked clone desktops scaled up linearly as they registered a desktop check-in in the Horizon View logs.  Performance of the virtual desktops did not take a hit either as the number of instances increase as seen in the graph below.

1000 linked clones performance

1000 logins in 1000 seconds

Login storms, love them or hate them, it’s a part of doing business.  Every morning, users all login around the same time, and infrastructure needs to be able to handle that.  For this test, SimpliVity wanted to see just how much load could be put on the system during a scenario such as this, so the login time was adjusted to occur every second (a 2.8x increase over the industry standard for testing) which means that by 1000 seconds, all 1000 desktops will have performed a login.

1000 logins 1000 secondsI think the results here speak for themselves.  As the number of active sessions increases, performance remains steady and well below the threshold where users would see problems.

The full results of all the testing is posted here.  I’m really excited by this development and can’t wait to see what can be achieved in the future.