Virsto for vSphere
Virsto for vSphere changes the economics of storage in virtualized environments. 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.
Virsto for vSphere - Product Overview
Reducing Storage Cost & Complexity in Virtualized Environments
Virsto for vSphere changes the economics of storage in virtualized environments by increasing virtual machine (VM) performance by up to 10x, while simultaneously consuming up to 90% less capacity. This combination of higher performance and significantly less storage capacity consumption can cut storage costs by up to 70%. In addition to significant capital expenditure savings, Virsto accelerates and simplifies virtual machine provisioning and storage management with seamless integration into the existing workflows of vSphere. Virsto was architected from the ground up to solve virtual machine storage performance and management inefficiencies.
Virsto for vSphere Delivers:
- A non-disruptive, 100 percent software solution that installs as a virtual storage appliance (VSA), enabling storage optimization with any existing block-level storage
- Native support for vSphere 4.1
- Seamless integration into existing VM management and provisioning workflows through VMware vCenter and View Manager
- Virsto RapidSnaps: the industry’s most scalable, highest-performance snapshots and writable clones, delivering unprecedented rapid provisioning and granular backup and recovery
- Integrated Rapid Provisioning Wizards for VMware View 4.5
- Support for all block-based and SSD storage
- Software based tiering: support for up to four distinct tiers for ultimate flexibility and cost management
- Advanced yet easy-to-use storage management features including VM storage self-provisioning, automated storage space reclamation and thin provisioning.
Introducing the Virsto vDisk - A New Virtual Storage Object
Many virtual machines on a single server attempting to write to shared storage cause their I/O to blend and become random as it writes to storage, which causes significant performance degradation. The current best practice for production workloads is to provision each virtual machine with a fixed amount of storage capacity at the point of creating the VM - often 30-40 Gb per virtual machine, to provide reliable performance. In large environments with hundreds or thousands of VMs, it quickly becomes apparant why storage consumption and budgets have increased so dramatically with the adoption of server virtualization.
Virsto delivers dramatic performance and space-savings improvements through the use of a new virtual storage object, the Virsto vDisk. Virsto's vDisk appears to vSphere as an eager-zero thick VMDK, which is the highest performance virtual storage object in the VMware environment. Virsto's unique vDisk virtual storage target delivers higher performance than native VMDKs, while only consuming storage capacity as data is actually committed, avoiding the need to pre-allocate storage capacity that often is never consumed. This approach allows IT organizations to drive storage capacity utilization up by 90% - on the existing storage already in use.
The Virsto vDisk delivers the benefit of thin-provisioned Linked-clones, with the production-level performance of an eager-zero thick VMDK. Virsto presents this new virtual storage object directly into the existing VM provisioning workflow in vCenter, which is transparent and fully supported by all vSphere operations.
Seamless integration into existing vSphere environment
Virsto vDisks fit seamlessly into your existing vSphere management environment. When Virsto is installed, a Virsto tab appears on the vCenter management GUI that enables initial installation, configuration, and access to several wizards not available in vSphere that optimize selected provisioning workflows (such as the rapid provisioning of thousands of desktops with high performance storage). Most daily operations, including VM creation and monitoring and alerting, leverage standard vCenter capabilities. Virsto supports key tools in the vSphere ecosystem, including vCenter, VMware Tools, VMware HA, VMware DRS, and vMotion. This approach preserves existing investments in vSphere administrative expertise while enhancing the native storage capabilities of vSphere.
Rapid provisioning
Virtual Machine Provisioning is often a slow, tedious, manual process. Creating Virtual Machines from a golden master requires data to be copied as part of the provisioning process. It is common for this step in the VM lifecycle to take 15 - 30 minutes - per virtual machine. While this is a revolutionary time saving step compared to acquiring and provisioning a new physical server, in use cases such as Test & Development and Desktop Virtualization, the highly dynamic nature of setting up and decommissioning hundreds of VMs consumes hours per week of the server and desktop administrator's time. Virsto delivers seamless provisioning wizards directly from the vCenter management environment, reducing the time to provision VMs to seconds.
Scalable, High Performance Snapshots & Writeable Clones
Virsto provides very rapid snapshot and clone creation, without consuming any additional storage capacity. Virsto reduces provisioning and deployment times in virtualized 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.
Support for Any Block-based and SSD Storage
When Virsto is first installed and configured, storage capacity is checked in to the Virsto Storage vPool. There is no limit to the number of physical hosts running Virsto that can be configured to the Virsto vPool. Any block based storage capacity can be checked into the vPool, which enables organizations to maximize storage utilization and capacity with heterogeneous storage capacity that may exist in their environment. Since Virsto delivers high end storage management features via software, lower cost block-based storage can be made to deliver equivalent performance without paying a premium for embedded array-based storage management software features such as snapshots, clones and thin provisioning.
Virsto Logging Architecture
Virsto relies on a small (10 Gb) dedicated log to be configured for each physical host running Virsto, the Virsto vLog. This logging architecture is the key to write performance acceleration of up to 10x, as the Virsto vDisks present only sequential I/O to the log, which then immediately commits the write and allows the virtual machine to move on to its next operation immediately. Virsto delivers sequentialized I/O to this log, improving performance for spinning media, and allowing maximum performance for SSD if it is placed in the vLog, since random I/O to SSD reduces its performance to the equivalent of spinning disk.
Maximize Performance, Minimize SSD: Support for up to four storage tiers
The rapid adoption of SSD is a trend that continues to accelerate. Virsto enables organizations to acquire and leverage a limited amount of premium priced SSD, while still delivering performance acceleration across much less costly storage tiers. The Virsto vPool supports up to four tiers of storage to be configured. In the case of VDI, allocating SSD in the Virsto vLog and in a primary tier with a golden master, with all user profile data stored on less costly Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage, delivers extremely high end user performance but with a significantly reduced cost per virtual desktop for storage.
Virsto fully supports vMotion
Virsto is installed in the hypervisor of each physical host as a Virtual Storage Appliance. Once Virsto is installed and the Virsto vPool is configured, Virsto maintains a map of every vDisk in the Virsto environment and where each VM physically resides. If a virtual machine undergoes a vMotion from one physical host to another, Virsto seamlessly maintains the updated mapping.
Storage Self-Provisioning
Virsto reduces operational inefficiencies within IT organizations by enabling server administratiion teams to self-provision storage for their virtual machines. Virsto allows storage administrations to focus on optimizing their enterprise storage environments, without having to repeatedly carve off additional LUNs for virtualized workloads. Once Virsto is configured with raw storage capacity, the server team can work within a contained environment that removes the need to request storage capacity for VMs from the Storage team.
Seamless integration with VMware View
Virsto for vSphere provides seamless integration with VMware View Manager, generating thousands of high performance, space-efficient virtual desktops through the Virsto rapid provisioning wizard, which are transparently managed via View Manager.
“San Diego State University Library delivers secure, reliable access to research materials for rapid dissemination of information and self-service interactions via dependable, modern equipment to our highly mobile, always-on students and faculty. While we have made significant investments in hardware, software and training, the major limiting factor for expansion of our virtual desktop pilot has been the cost of storage necessary to meet both performance and space requirements.
Virsto’s automated provisioning workflow and seamless integration with VMware View provides the ability to rapidly provision hundreds of new desktops and automatically reclaim storage. We observed a marked improvement in desktop performance using Virsto, thus reducing our storage cost per desktop. Additionally the ability to more easily manage a heterogeneous storage environment provides the option to choose purpose built hardware appliances to meet specific needs without increasing storage management overhead."
-Kyle Murley, Server, Desktop, and Web Services Team Lead, San Diego State University Library
