smart storage

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): An Introduction

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) introduces a new way of managing user environments. VDI allows IT administrators to host and administer user desktops on Virtual Infrastructure in the data center. Users access their desktop using a remote desktop protocol. While sharing similarities with other computing models, VDI offers many new and compelling benefits for increasing manageability, performance, and security of user desktops/PCs.

Choosing the Right VDI Software: VMware Horizon View

The key to success of any VDI initiative is choosing the right virtualization software. VMware Horizon™ Suite, and more specifically VMware Horizon View™, delivers a personalized high fidelity experience for end users across all sessions and devices. It enables higher availability and agility of desktop services unmatched by traditional PCs, while reducing the total cost of desktop ownership by up to 50%. VMware Horizon View end users achieve higher levels of productivity and the freedom to access desktops from more devices and locations.

Tintri: The Proven Storage Solution for VDI

Tintri Zero Management Storage™ was designed to address the mismatch between traditional storage solutions and the demands of virtualized environments. Built on the industry’s only intelligent VM-aware storage architecture, Tintri VMstore has the intelligence to deliver unparalleled performance and efficiency, and end-to-end insights into the storage infrastructure for unmatched VM control. With the high-performing, validated VMware® Horizon View™ and Tintri reference architecture, you can:

• Lower risk and cost-effectively deploy and scale desktop virtualization with as many as 1,000 end-users per Tintri VMstore
• Deliver a high performing and consistent end-user experience with Ultrabook levels of performance
• Keep end users connected and productive from a wide variety of clients with affordable easy to manage continuity

Tintri for high IOPS and virtualized platforms.

PTS has been running Tintri in its own environment and has implemented Tintri for some large financial and educational institutions to deal with the high IOPS demands of virtualized environments that you just can’t get with storage architecture that was designed to optimize LUN and block level storage. Tintri is a near “zero” management NFS storage solution built specifically to manage virtual environments for servers, desktops, test development, and production workloads.  The file system is built from the ground up, allowing you to solve a lot of the complexities and inefficiencies traditional storage brings to the table.

What Tintri offers and how Tintri is different:

• Tintri provides three models of the Tintri VMstore storage system: the T620, the T540, and the T650. The T620 supports up to 500 VMs and 13.5 usable TB of storage. The T540 up to 1,000 VMs and 13.5 TB. And the T650 supports up to 2,000 VMs and 33.5 TB of storage.
• Tintri is described as “smart storage” for virtual machines:
  • Tintri “sees.” at the right level of abstraction for your business, providing direct meaningful communication between your applications and infrastructure teams. All monitoring, reporting, and control operations are done at the VM and vDisk level of abstraction.
  • Tintri “learns.” Traditional storage forces your infrastructure teams to predict the future at acquisition time and decide how much of each tier to acquire. Further, they require you to tune various volumes for expected workloads (optimizing for reads vs. writes, sequential vs. random, etc.), The Tintri VMstore, on the other hand continuously monitors the actual workloads that are being generated, recognizing that workloads are always changing and static optimizations for particular workloads are only correct for very limited periods of time.
  • Tintri “adapts.” By knowing what type of workload is being presented by each virtual disk, the VMstore automatically allocates the appropriate resources at each location in the IO stack (network, memory, cpu, flash, and disk). This continuous and automatic resource allocation provides significant advantages in terms of performance isolation, protecting you from the common “noisy neighbor” problem often faced in highly virtualized environments.

Tintri’s claims of 99% of in-flight IO serviced from flash with no knobs, no configuration, and no on-going tuning seems incredible, but, they’ve successfully proven this in production at a large number of well known enterprise customers.  The best way to confirm these claims is to bring the product in for evaluation.  It’s simple to install and you will be able to see measurable results quickly.

VDI Deployment

PTS can deploy VDI from within PTS’ Cloud Data Center or from a hosted deployment. Contact PTS with your VDI needs, and we’ll tailor a solution to match your requirements in your preferred environment.

• Download White Paper: Tintri VDI with VMware Horizon View Guide (PDF)
• Download White Paper: Managing VM Data with Tintri (PDF)

To learn more about related PTS Services and Programs, contact us or visit:

• PTS VDI Solutions
• Data Center Planning & Pre-Design Services
• PTS Data Center Power & Cooling Systems Analysis
• Data Center Site Assessment
• Data Center Availability & Risk Assessment
• Data Center Feasibility Consulting
• Data Center Project Cost Estimating
• Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
• Thermography Assessment Service
• PTS Data Center Energy Usage Assessment Service
• PTS Virtualization Strategies & Assessments
• IT Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery

 Back to Tintri Manufacturer Page

The Tintri plugin for VMware vSphere® Web Client is the next milestone in enhancing the VMware ecosystem integration, a journey that started with Tintri VAAI plugin for creating space and performance efficient clones from vCenter interface. The Tintri vSphere Web Client Plugin extends other Tintri VM-aware benefits to vCenter. Natively integrated with the VMware infrastructure, Tintri vSphere Web Client Plugin allows administrators to leverage Tintri VM-aware capabilities, such as per-VM snapshots, clones, and replication, from vCenter interface to further simplify day-to-day management of large virtual environments and leverage Tintri per VM-level data management capabilities.

Centralized Day-to-Day Storage Monitoring

VMstore Dashboard: Tintri vSphere Web Client Plugin provides rich insights into VMstore level performance and capacity usage and trending metrics eliminating the challenges administrators face in performance and capacity monitoring and trending. The unique performance and capacity gauges give administrators immediate visibility to both the available performance headroom and storage capacity on any Tintri VMstore appliance. For the first time, administrators can get storage performance utilization with a single, easy-to-use metric – right from the vSphere Web Client. The Tintri dashboard information also quickly identifies VMs with the most changes in performance or capacity utilization in the past seven days without the need to understand how VMs map to the storage components—all you need to know is the name of the VM—Tintri VMstore manages the details for you.

Review and Acknowledge VMstore Alerts: Tintri vSphere Web Client Plugin provides integrated monitoring and management of VMstore in the vSphere Web Client UI. Administrators can review and acknowledge alerts from multiple VMstore systems centrally from the vSphere Web Client UI. Centralized monitoring also allows the administrators to correlate the alerts from VMstore with those from the rest of the virtual infrastructure to get an end-to-end picture.

VMstore Inventory Summary: Tintri vSphere Web Client Plugin provides summary of all VMstore systems deployed in virtual infrastructure. Administrators can view summary VMstore characteristics such as VMstore model number, serial number, Tintri OS software version, uptime without needing to log in to individual VMstore systems and drill down to get additional details, such as performance and capacity dashboards, at a VMstore level.

• Download Tintri vSphere Web Client Plugin Data Sheet

 Back to Tintri Manufacturer Page