LSI Nytro WarpDrive Flash Acceleration Cards for VMware Horizon

LSI Corporation announced that it is working with Vmware Inc. to deliver virtual desktop density for VMware Horizon View deployments.

Collaborative testing with VMware Horizon View using a single LSI Nytro WarpDrive application acceleration card achieved concurrent support for 200 active VDI workloads on a two-node cluster with no storage latency.

“Our testing of the LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards confirms Nytro technology can support demanding VDI workload environments with simplified management and increasing security and control,” said Mason Uyeda, senior director of technical marketing, end-user computing, VMware. “LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards will help enable our customers to overcome the latency demands of VDI-intensive workloads to deliver high performance and ROI.”

VDI environments generate I/O-intensive workloads that cannot always be adequately addressed by traditional HDD drives. Typical VDI workloads generate small, random write-intensive bursts of I/O during peak periods, forcing IT organisations to over-provision expensive storage resources to meet that peak demand. The Nytro WarpDrive card helps to eliminate infrastructure guesswork and improve storage utilisation by providing a flash-based solution with both predictable and reduced application response times.

Testing Details
To demonstrate the benefits of deploying the card in a VDI implementation, LSI and VMware emulated demanding, real-world end user workloads using Login VSI version 4.02 and View Planner 3 to drive 200 active desktops. It supported the 200 active desktop workloads, achieving a VSImax rating of 280 before exhausting CPU resources. The demonstration also showed that at 150 desktops per ESXi node, eight hosts can scale to 1,000 concurrent desktops at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional SAN deployments with similar performance characteristics.

“Working closely with VMware, we’re able to confirm through this real-world application that IT organisations can comfortably deploy 150 desktops per node with 75 to 80% concurrency and a VMware Horizon View clone deployment time of under 13 minutes,” said Robin Wagner, senior director of marketing, datacentre solutions group, LSI. “We’re excited to collaborate with VMware to provide native VMware drivers in vSphere and help bring this breakthrough VDI density and performance to our mutual customers.”

The card is a part of the Nytro product portfolio of application acceleration cards combining PCIe flash technology with caching and management software. They are designed to deliver high performance, reduced latency and a low CPU burden for the most demanding database applications and I/O-intensive workloads.