Improving VDI Performance at Fairbanks Sewer and Water
Fairbanks Sewer and Water is a Utilities company in Alaska. FSW's IT department had deployed over a hundred desktop and server VMs.
Their end users of virtual desktops were complaining about long application load times, long boot times, cursor freezes, and general slowness in their VDI VMs, all classic symptoms of slow storage.
These VMs were spread across storage appliances from two different vendors. VirtuCache was ideally suited to improve the performance of these VMs, since it would do so across all their VMs, without requiring any reconfiguration of the appliances or networks, and without any regard to which appliances were hosting the VMs. VirtuCache caching from Datastores on these appliances to in-ESXi host PCIe SSD would completely mask the poor performance of these appliances.
Reducing Build Times for ServiceNow’s Dev/Ops
ServiceNow's Itapp Dev/Ops team wanted to improve build times for their dev/test infrastructure. They knew that storage latencies needed to be reduced considerably to achieve this goal. They ideally wanted to improve storage performance without upgrading their storage appliance or network.
To achieve this end, Virtucache was installed on each of their 3 ESXi hosts, configured to cache from Datastores on their HP 3PAR appliance to an in-VMware host 1.6TB PM1725 PCIE flash card.
VirtuCache was configured to cache both reads and writes for all VMs. VirtuCache automatically replicates the writes to another SSD on another host. This caching policy is called 'Write Back One Replica'. Write replication is done to prevent data loss in case of host failure. If a host were to fail, then VirtuCache would immediately sync the SAN from backup copy of writes (write replicas) that are on another host. In Virtucache, all caching operations, including write replication, are automatic.
Using VirtuCache, ServiceNow was successfully able to reduce code compile times in their dev/ops group to a third of what they were experiencing before.
Virtunet Powers Storage in The Ark
The Ark Encounter, in Williamstown, Kentucky, features a full-size Noah’s Ark built according to the dimensions of the Bible. Answers in Genesis (AiG) is the Christian ministry responsible for The Ark Encounter.
AiG's IT department had a few ESXi hosts connected to their HP Store VSA. As a result of increased attendance at the Ark, their VMware workload increased dramatically, which in turn resulted in performance issues within VMs.
AiG turned to VirtuCache to mitigate their storage latency issues. By caching frequently and recently used data (both reads and writes) to in-host SSDs+RAM, Virtunet resolved their storage performance issues. We competed with HP Store VSA's Adaptive Optimization(AO) feature, which is HP's tiering functionality for the VSA.
Here is how VirtuCache competes with the Store VSA's tiering functionality.
Reducing Latencies in vGPU Assisted VDI at Nippon Steel
vGPU is new functionality in VMware vSphere 6.0 where a physical GPU within a ESXi host can be shared across multiple VMs. vGPUs help virtualize physical GPU workstations that are used for mapping, mathematical modeling, CAD, CAM, and gaming applications.
These GPU reliant applications are storage IO intensive, since GPUs are used in situations where large computations are rapidly performed on large datasets. So it helps if this dataset is cached locally to in-VMware host high speed media instead of being retrieved from backend storage all the time. This is what VirtuCache host side caching software does. Caching data closer to the GPU results in quicker completion times for GPU assisted operations.
PetaByte Scale Enterprise Grade SAN for the Creation Museum
Creation Museum in Kentucky, USA is a museum about Bible history and creationism. Their storage needs were typical of a museum, requiring large amounts of storage for digital multimedia content related to the various exhibits at the museum.
They were looking for the below list of features from their new storage:
The ability to sustain a loss of any one component – server, HDD, SSD, NIC card, software instance etc;
The ability for this storage to interface with VMware over iSCSI;
They wanted to reuse their HP and SuperMicro servers, each of these servers was of a different vintage and configuration;
Ability to quickly search and present content that was stored on their fileserver and content management system;
It needed to be considerably low cost, especially since they already had server hardware that had all the Hard Drives and SSDs to meet their raw storage needs;