News

Fusion-io Speeds VDI Performance

Get drop-in VDI acceleration without storage sprawl.

• By Christa Ayer
• 03/03/2014

Fusion-io has released its ioVDI software, which improves response times in Vmware Horizon View hosted virtual desktop environments. Fusion ioVDI combines server flash performance with the manageability of installed shared storage. Fusion-io promises drop-in VDI acceleration for hundreds of users per server without expensive storage sprawl.

Key to ioVDI is technology Fusion-io calls "write vectoring." In virtual desktops, many writes (writes to temporary, swap, and other transient files) do not need to be persisted to shared storage. Write vectoring redirects approximately 80 percent of writes to local flash storage, greatly offloading the shared storage infrastructure. By limiting shared storage activity, write vectoring preserves the use of VMware features such as vMotion, HA, DRS, and SRM that require shared storage, while reducing SAN or NAS performance dependencies.

Fusion ioVDI also uses a proprietary technology called transparent file sharing to speed reboot times. TFS allows hosted virtual desktops to simultaneously share common files. As VMware Horizon View Storage Accelerator can use up to 2GB of RAM, TFS optimizes performance by rapidly sharing common files throughout the VDI infrastructure. TFS also provides in-line, file-level de-duplication of all desktops hosted on a server. Unlike block-level deduplication, TFS de-duplication operates at the application level, which serves I/O directly from the cache. TFS also helps eliminate boot and other storms by allowing VMs to access data locally on server-side flash rather than on shared storage.