Virsto for VDI, Hyper-V Edition

When deployed with Virsto, Hyper-V delivers higher, more predictable storage performance, uses up to 90% less storage capacity, and allows the widespread use of snapshots and clones to ease administration without incurring performance degradation.

Virsto for VDI, Hyper-v Edition, 2.0 Delivers:

• A non-disruptive, 100 percent software solution that installs in the Hyper-V Parent Partition, enabling storage optimization with any existing block-level storage
• Native support for Hyper-V and Microsoft Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager
• Seamless integration with Microsoft DPM and VSS for backup and recovery
• Virsto Global Image Snapshot: complete Virsto Environment Snapshot for offsite backup
• Software based tiering: support for up to four distinct tiers
• Bulk virtual machine provisioning wizards for VDI use case

Virsto’s Storage Hypervisor Drives Virtualization Throughout the Enterprise

By removing operational inefficiencies and significantly reducing the capital cost and complexity of storage in virtualized environments, Virsto helps organizations drive the benefits of virtualization throughout the enterprise by changing the economics of storage in virtualization use cases.

Achieve both Cost Savings and Management benefits with Desktop Virtualization

Compared to physical desktops, desktop virtualization initiatives promise to deliver both cost savings as well as end-point management benefits. Virsto removes the largest impediment to cost-effective VDI by reducing the cost of storage per virtual desktop by up to 70 percent and provides integrated provisioning wizards for VMware View that simplify and accelerate provisioning and patching thousands of high performance, thin-provisioned virtual desktops.

Features

Increased storage performance

Virsto for VDI creates a virtual storage layer that presents VHDs to virtual machines running in Hyper-V. Virsto vDisks look like native Hyper-V fixed disks, but they are thin-provisioned, high performance, cluster-aware, and support extremely scalable snapshot/clone technology – all at the same time. When deployed with Virsto, Hyper-V delivers higher, more predictable storage performance, and uses up to 90% less storage capacity.

Rapid provisioning

Provisioning can be a real challenge in VDI environments, particularly as they grow to hundreds or thousands of desktops. Virsto supports very rapid snapshot and clone creation, without consuming any additional storage capacity. It has been proven to reduce provisioning and deployment times in VDI environments by up to 74%. Virsto minimizes the amount of time you spend refreshing desktop images after software updates or patches. Clones run at the storage performance limit of the underlying hardware, regardless of how many of them there are.

Fully supports Windows Server failover clusters and live migration

If you would like to be able to leverage live migration in your VDI environments but are concerned that SSD-based appliances cannot support that, note that Virsto for VDI fully supports Windows Server failover clusters and live migration. While you may not want to enable failover at the virtual desktop level, it can be interesting to use manual live migrations to quickly and easily move desktops off of a Hyper-V host that needs to be patched, or use Windows Server failover cluster to automatically restart all the desktops on a host that unexpectedly fails. Virsto’s support for live migration and failover clusters can give you more leeway in choosing between persistent and non-persistent modes for desktops.

Virsto vDisks fit seamlessly into existing System Center management environment

Virsto supports key tools in the System Center ecosystem, including Windows VSS, Microsoft DPM, Virtual Machine Manager, and Operations Manager. There is even a Systems Center Operations Manager Management Pack that further improves integration in these environments (available at no charge to Virsto’s Hyper-V customers). This approach preserves existing investments in System Center administrative expertise while enhancing the native storage capabilities of Hyper-V.