© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 1 © 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 1
Accelerate Citrix XenDesktop with Cisco UCS and Cisco UCS Storage Accelerator
Ravi Balakrishnan, Ashok Rajagopalan
With Intel® Xeon® processor
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 2
VDI: Impact of Infrastructure
Average Cost per Virtual Desktop
(US$)
$160
$125
$40
$150
$125
$50
Storage
Server
Networking
Endpoint
Broker
Licensing
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 3
Desktop Virtualization Storage
Capacity Storage Performance Storage
What: User data and profiles
How: Storage services
Where: Shared storage
What: Linked clones
How: IOPS
Where: Server flash memory storage
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 4
Desktop Virtualization Storage
What: User data and profiles
How: Storage services
Where: Shared storage
What: Linked clones
How: IOPS
Where: Server flash memory storage
Capacity
Storage
Performance
Storage
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 5
Shared Storage Challenges
Cost of IOPS
SAN and storage manageability
Lumpiness for scale (horizontal
scalability)
Predictability
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 6
Benefits of Server Caching for VDI
Lower cost of IOPS
Improved performance:
IOPS and latency
Server-based
manageability
Smaller blocks for
scalability
Predictable
performance at scale
Less power consumption
and floor space
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 7
Scalable Design
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions Portfolio (Lowest cost per Desktop with Optimized UCS Infrastructure)
Data Center Designs/Architectures
Segment
• Scale-out environment
with shared storage
• Targeted for medium &
large scale environments
SMB
Mid-Market Enterprise
Service Provider
500 Seats 20000 Seats 5000 Seats 2000 Seats
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Designs
On-Board Design
• Integrated Solution with
Tier-0 Storage on Server
• Targeted for non-
persistent desktops
Simplified Design
• “Appliance” config with
collapsed n/w layer with
shared storage
• Targeted for medium
scale environments
Converged
Infrastructure
• Turnkey Solutions with
integrated compute stacks
• Targeted for medium & large
scale environments
7
With Intel® Xeon® processor
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 8
Traditional Architecture
Virtual Desktops Platform + OS
and Hypervisor
Server Storage
Controller Storage Media
• Read and write operations serviced by the storage array
• For IOPS-intensive workloads, backlogs and serialization occur at the access fabric, storage controller, and
storage media
• Best read and write performance would be read from and write commit on the storage controller write cache
• Queue depths on the controller serialize IOPS
Write latency = ~ 600 microseconds to 15 milliseconds (ms)
Read latency = ~ 600 microseconds to 10 ms
Network
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 9
Server Tier-0 Architecture
Virtual Desktops Platform + OS
and Hypervisor
Server Storage
Controller Storage Media
Write latency = ~ 600 microseconds to 15 milliseconds (ms)
Read latency = ~ 600 microseconds to 10 ms
• Reads and writes serviced by Cisco UCS® storage accelerator
(PCIe flash memory)
• 10 times more IOPS compared to 20 times more for SSDs
behind a RAID controller
• Consistent performance of random read-write operations
• Queue depth does not matter
Cisco UCS storage accelerator-based solution can
reduce average read latency by 5 times compared to
enterprise shared storage
Cisco UCS storage accelerator-based solution can
reduce average read latency by 5 times compared to
enterprise shared storage
Network
With Intel® Xeon® processor
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 10
Cisco UCS Architecture with Citrix
B200 M3 Blade Server
VDI clones x 140+ per
blade (streamed from
Citrix PVS vDisk)
• Cisco UCS® server with 8 GB of RAM,
and 2 CPUs
• OS caches vDisk file data at the block level
• 64-bit OS provides better caching performance:
typically up to 1000 streams per server
Citrix
XenDesktop
5.6
Brokers
E1
4GB E1
4GB E1
4GB E1
4GB Volumes (mounted on flash memory LUNs
assigned to hypervisors)
(Read-Write I/O)
E1 virtual disk total 4
GB (per clone)
Microsoft Windows
swap file placed here
automatically by
Citrix PVS target
device agent
Citrix PVS write cache
Write cache deleted at
virtual machine
shutdown
Citrix PVS 6.1 farm
(provides resilience
and load balancing
for vDisk stream)
vDisk1
vDisk1
vDisk1
vDisks synchronized
manually on each
Citrix PVS server
(vDisk
Standard mode)
Set to Cache on
Device Disk
Provisioning
Server Farm
With Intel® Xeon® processor
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 11
Economics of IOPS
* Includes industry-standard enterprise storage to support up to 2000 desktops with 1-year support (US$286,000), 4 ports of Cisco Nexus® 5000 Series
Switches, and 4 storage port licenses for Cisco UCS fabric interconnect, all at ASP
** Includes Cisco UCS and Fusion-io 785-GB cards at ASP
$0
$50,000
$100,000
$150,000
$200,000
$250,000
$300,000
SAN withEnterprise Storage*
UCS StorageAccelerators: UCSFusion IO 785GB**
$294,064
$147,000
Storage Costs for 2000 Virtual Desktops For 2000-desktop solution, Cisco UCS® and
Fusion-io flash memory solution can reduce
storage costs by 50% compared to standard
enterprise shared storage
A single Cisco UCS Fusion-io 785-GB card can
provide up to 500,000 writes (512 KB): about
10 times more write IOPS than typical shared
storage for 2000 desktops
A single Cisco UCS Fusion-io 785-GB card can
provide up to 100,000 reads (512 KB): about
3 times more write IOPS than typical shared
storage for 2000 desktops
½ the cost
With Intel® Xeon® processor
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 12
Power Consumption and Floor Space
* Assumes that a typical 15,000-rpm SAS drive on Industry-standard enterprise storage consumes 8W, and assumes 20% additional overhead for
controller, shelves, and management nodes
** Cisco UCS and Fusion-io 785-GB card typically consumes 20W, and on average 130 virtual desktops are supported on Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade
Server
• Cisco UCS® storage accelerator is 16 times more energy efficient per virtual desktop
compared to typical enterprise storage
• Cisco UCS storage accelerator consumes no incremental floor space for the solution
0.00 0.50 1.00 1.50 2.00 2.50
UCS Storage Accelerator: UCS Fusion IO 785GB**
Industry Standard Shared Storage*
0.15
2.4
Watts per Virtual Desktop
Power Consumption per Virtual Desktop
With Intel® Xeon® processor
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 13
Call To Action
Desktop Virtualization
Design Guides
www.cisco.com/go/vdi
www.cisco.com/go/citrix
www.cisco.com/go/vdidesigns
www.cisco.com/go/designzone
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 14
Receive 4 stamps by visiting our demos and a theater session to enter the daily drawing
• Demo #1: Accelerate Citrix XenDesktop with Cisco UCS and Cisco
UCS Storage Accelerator
• Demo #2: Simplify Citrix XenApp with Cisco UCS and Cisco VM-FEX
• Demo #3: Cisco UCS and CloudPlatform
• Demo #4: Cisco UCS Manager
• Demo #5: Cisco Office in a Box for Branch and Remote Office
Deployments
• Demo #6: Collaboration-Ready Virtual Workspace on Any Device
• Demo #7: Cisco Desktop Virtualization Automation
• Demo #8: GPU Enabled Rich Media on Cisco UCS
• Demo #9: Secure, Scalable, Optimized Virtual Experience
• Theatre Presentation
Cisco at Citrix Synergy Passport Program
Questions?
With Intel® Xeon® processor
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 15 © 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 15
Thank You
Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
Co-sponsored by Intel®