Just before the holidays, we released Flex-IO! It’s our “read and write” IOPS accelerator for non-persistent VDI. We have since done our full blown launch on the product and have accounts in production and many accounts in active POC’s.
I just wanted to review the process of how easy it is to measure your existing IOPS today, layer on Flex-IO on top of existing storage, measure your IOPS after and then point your non-persistent VDI pool at the newly created storage.
Here’s all the process entails
- Pick a storage volume you want to accelerate IOPS and reduce latency on.
- Put a persistent windows 7 desktop on this storage volume (should NOT have an open snap shot).
- Run IOmetter with our recommended VDI best practices configuration. – http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/iometer/iometer2006.07.27.win32.i386setup.exe?download http://download.liquidwarelabs.com/Flex-IO/iometer-80w-20r.icf
- Record your IOPS and Latency.
- Download Flex-IO from our Website – http://www.liquidwarelabs.com/download
- Install Flex-IO on a Windows 2008 R2 Server, 1 CPU 2 GB RAM and 3 GB of free disk space works fine.
- Login to https://<server>:4443 – using the local windows administrator account or an Active Directory domain admin account.
- Provide Flex-IO with Virtual Center administrative credentials.
- Click Deploy Flex-IO.
- Pick a host that can see the storage you picked in step 1.
- Click submit.
- After about 5 mins you will have a new datastore called <flex-io-esxi-hostname>.
- Power down your VM from step 2 and migrate it to the new Flex-IO storage <flex-io-esxi-hostname>.
- Measure your IOPS again and record your IOPS and latency.
- Edit your non-persistent pool pointing it at your new datastore called <host-name-flex-io> and you should start seeing faster login times and faster application load times!
(If you want to see screen shots around this process you can view the manual here – http://www.liquidwarelabs.com/docs/Liquidware-Labs-Flex-IO-Admin-Guide.pdf)
What is really exciting about this technology is the level of automation that has been done. All virtual center related tasks have been fully automated. You should be able to measure IOPS, install Flex-IO and measure IOPS all within an hour!!
Our download of the product is frictionless (besides a form to fill out) give the product a spin for yourself and let us know how it goes!
For more information on Liquidware Labs Flex-IO visit the Flex-IO Product Page or contact sales at Liquidware Labs.
In step two I assume you mean non-persistent. If I don’t have a Windows Server 2008 R2 system does that mean I can’t deploy Flex-IO? Why do you use IOmeter 2006, other vendors have told me to run 2010. Do I need to install 2006 or can I use the 2010 version I’ve installed?
Step 2, we use a persistent desktop to show what overall volume can do. When you have an open snap or link’d clone you can only get around 5K IOPS. So the volume is ok, it’s just once you have a non-persistent desktops a single desktop can only get to about 5K in IOPS. If you don’t have a windows 2008 R2 Server for the Flex-IO Mgmt. console you could use a windows 7 VM for the Flex-IO mgmt console. See the downloads from IOMetter site here
http://www.iometer.org/doc/downloads.html
You should use the version we link too so the configuration we provide works.