vSphere 5 Top 10 Countdown: View Accelerator at #10

VMware vSphere 5 is packed with great new features, many more than we are about to cover in this feature countdown. I have chosen the top 10 features that I believe most people will be most interested in, and this time we kick it off with number 10 slot: VMware View Accelerator.

At first glance one would think the VMware View Accelerator is a licensing package, since VMware currently has Accelerator packages. But make no mistake: The View accelerator is one of the coolest features in vSphere 5 and since I am particularly focused and interested in desktop virtualization, I could not help it but start with this feature.

For years now, desktop virtualization technology has been plagued with different types of "storms," from bootup storms to login storms all the way through anti-virus storms and others. vSphere 5 takes a giant leap forward in addressing the issue pf boot storms using what is now know as the View Accelerator.

Even though certain aspects of View Accelerator, such as the cache, are configured from the VMware View Composer, View Accelerator is really more of a hypervisor feature, not a VMware View product feature.

The accelerator works by caching bits of the master image in memory on each ESXi host. When VMs start to boot, it redirects and de-duplicates VDI VMs to boot from those cached bits. This approach significantly reduces if not completely eliminates the boot-up storm issues. The number of VDI VMs to ESXi host is right about 60VMs, which can very easily be managed by the local ESXi memory cache.

It is worth noting here that Citrix's XenServer has a similar feature known as IntelliCache. It basically does the same thing by caching the bits of the master image in memory and booting the VDI VMs from this local cache, thereby significantly reducing the IOPS dependency while maintaining centralized control and management.

So, take a guess what number 9 will be...

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/19/2011 at 12:49 PM