Dealing with login storms

[Chadd]

Every morning, about 600-700 users log in at once. The VMs are already booted up. This is bringing my SAN to its knees until everyone is log in, then everything will run smoothly throughout the day.

I'm curious, is there any good way to deal with these login storms? We are running the environment on one SAN with about 1500 VMs on it. They are running windows 7.

[Linjo]

Are you using View Storage Accelerator already? If not that would be something to look at to solve this:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmware-view-storage-accelerator-host-caching-content-based...

[marcdrinkwater]

Linjo is right.  Logon mainly consists of read IOPS so the View Storage accelerator will resolve that to a certain extent.

Not sure what yoru SAN solution is but you need to be giving a lot of IOPs to your virtual desktops, in the form of fast/flash disks.

Or use a storage optimisation solution such as Atlantis ILIO which will deal with both read and write IOPs