Anyone using Tegile HA2100/HA2100EP for VDI??

[ebelange]

Interested to hear from anyone using Tegile's HA2100 or HA2100EP with VMware View.

We're looking at a VDI storage solution for a 500 seat deployment of VMware View with Windows 7 64-bit running as guest OS.

We're considering Nimble's CS220-X4, Equallogic PS6100S (All SSD array) and Tegile's HA2100EP

I believe that all 3 solutions will give me good performance but my concern at this point is the amount of disk space that i need to support 500 desktops. Tegile offers great features including NFS and CIFS protocol support as well as compression and inline dedup which makes me leans toward their solution.

I expect to make a decision within the next week but before i do, I would like to hear feedback from anyone using one of those boxes.

Thanks in advance for your responses.

[Flammi]

Usually Tegile recommends to use a three-way-mirror if performance is important.

In your case a two-way-mirror is probably the better way.

So without hot spare you would get  ~7.3 TB. With two hot spare in the system only ~5.5 TB.

I would not recommend to use raidz2. Read performance will be horrible.

I also doubt that you will get a 3-5x space savings due to compression and dedup. More like 2x.

Also, Tegile is build on ZFS. It's a filesystems that suffers from fragmentation. Performance will drop over time and you ought to keep 30% free.

The Nimble gives you 7,4 TB netto capacity and space savings due to compression. In VDI environments you should see about 1.5x compression.

With Nimble you do not need to keep 30% free. Fill rates up to 90% are no problem at all.

With the X4 model you can probably run a lot more than 500 desktops. If capacity becomes an issue just add a shelf.

They have a reference architecture for 1000 desktops running on a 220-X2.

The Tegile array is probably cheaper, but if you can afford the Nimble I'd go for that!

[Aginger]

We have been using the Tegile HA2100EP since October of 2011. We currently have a 200+ desktop production environment for our students running everything from linux to server 2012 and all the windows clients.. The box has performed better than our equallogic  at all tests and scenarios we have thrown at it. Different vendors compute dedup and compression savings different ways so here is a direct snip from our production box, so for 1.13TB of real world data we are only using 424 Gigs on the disks..

Creating replicas was at about 15 minutes on the Dell, now ~5 minutes for a ~40 gig image.

Their tech support has been responsive when needed, we just purchased a second controller and JBOD to use for student lab storage and imaging.

[PUREJOY]

<disclaimer, Pure employee here>

Have you considered trying out Pure Storage FlashArray (FA-300 or FA-400 series)? We are seeing some great results for View deployment.

Check out our reference architecture for View, the view planner score of 0.52 is the best score you will see out there.

Download Pure Storage VDI Reference Architecture for VMware View

The inline data reduction gives you more capacity than the raw capacity, and vdi is a great usecase for the all flash array.

--Ravi

vExpert '13

[ebelange]

I'm sorry, can someone translate this to English?

Note: It was an automated out-of-office response and has been removed.

Message was edited by: Brian Atkinson to add the note explaining the removal of the out of office message

[ebelange]

@Aginger: Hi, you said you are running 200+ virtual desktops, how has the performance been? Do you think the box could easily support 500 desktops?

[ebelange]

We've reached out to Pure Storage, unfortunately, it was too expensive.

[Aginger]

Difficult to say with a definitive answer. We have a large pool of entitled users(students and staff) but to date the most concurrent users we have had is ~30. Given what I have seen, especially provisioning the pools of desktops I could not see 500 desktops taxing the storage system at all. The only time I have been able to create strain on the system was on the physical hosts. We are currently running on 2 UCS B230M2s each running e7 2850s with 262Gigs of RAM, and even then It took 100 concurrent desktops running YouTube @ 1080p.

Hope this helps.

[PUREJOY]

@ebelange Thanks for you reply, just out of curiosity what is the price range you are looking into?

But that said, the price per desktop due to the inline data reduction will bring the cost per desktop to < $100.

[ebelange]

All I can say is the quote from purestorage was $30K more than the competition and that only included half a shelf of disks and 1 controller on the PureStorage system.

[rcommins]

Ebelange –

I like to think of this online community as a place where users can share information and avoid vendor hype.  It appears user Flammi does not feel the same way.  The FUD coming from his post reads right out of the playbook Nimble’s sales teams attempt to throw at prospects considering Tegile.

As opposed to engaging in a “mine is better than yours” dialog between vendors on the forum here, I encourage you to ask your Tegile sales team for customer references.  We have a very strong track record of helping customers successfully implement their VMware View projects.  As a matter of fact, here is a sneak peak link to a press release that is hitting the wire tomorrow at 8:30AM Eastern.  It tells the story of a school district with a failed VDI platform launched on the first day of school and how Tegile was able to immediately help them replace their storage system and reduce desktop delivery times from 18 minutes to 14 seconds.  To me, that type of story carries much more weight than bickering over drive sparing, false claims of fragmentation, etc.

Just for clarity’s sake, I am with Tegile, and proud of what we’ve accomplished in such a short amount of time.  Thank you for considering and hopefully choosing us to help your VMware View project succeed.

- Rob

[ebelange]

It took a while to come to this decision but we finally decided to go with Tegile's HA2100EP. In the end, it came down to the additional value that Tegile brings to the table over the other iSCSI only vendors. We like that it supports NFS and CIFS as well as iSCSI and Fiber Channel and the inline dedup will provide great disk capacity savings.

We had some concerns with Tegile being such a small and newer player in the game but after after talking to some of their customers about their experience, that sealed the deal for us. We can't wait to migrate over to Tegile and start seeing the performance improvement.

Once the array has been installed, we plan to put it to the test and run performance tests with 500 Vmware View desktops. I will update this post with our results as soon as possible.

Thank you to the VMware community for helping us with our decision. The advice and opinions we received here, have been very useful.

[rcommins]

Excellent news, ebelange!  I am sure you will be pleased.  Thank you for taking the time to do your homework and talking to other users.

Big thanks again to Aginger for jumping in,too!

Rob