View 5 unleashed on the world… And we’re here to support it at EMC. In this post, there are interesting performance testing results of View 5 vs. View 4.6.
But the main things between View 5 and View 4.6 have little to do with storage. The major pieces in View 5 to me are: the enhancements to PCoIP on low bandwidth and high latency links (let’s be frank as we always should be – this was always a View exposure); integrated persona management in Premier Edition; 3D graphics support, and don’t underestimate the importance of better unified communication support. Big release for the gang behind View. And here I am in a dorky video (once again proving I’m willing to do any silly thing) to say so :-)
I’ve sent VNX kit to support the View team as they work on their VMware-home grown View 5 Reference guides. At the same time, the EMC Solutions Group have been busy at work in View land.
They have published a new Reference Architecture/Practioners Guide for VMware View on VNX. The new bits:
- lots of NFS datastore best practices, and testing results. Over 2011, we’ve gotten about a 2x-3x improvement transactional NFS performance (measured by IO latency), which helps a lot in these use cases. BTW – all VNXes ship with that code now. Also a neat factoid – customers, you played a key role in that (see this blog post – it helped us optimize around the VMware use case a lot)
- View 4.6 and Composer 2.6. While of course not the latest, it’s important to understand – these can only be done properly once you have RTM code. The View 5 work is underway (see early testing results below)
The testing showed the incredible effects of the VNX’s “Flash 1st” approach – using Flash as both a read/write cache (FAST Cache) and as tier (using FAST VP) in the combined FAST Suite. While awesome with View 4.6 – using View 5.0 we saw even faster boot times – about 50% faster.
BUT before I show the 4.6 and 5.0 comparisons, I want to highlight an interesting observation.
Do you like to customize? Do you build your own stuff? Are you an iPad kind of person? Huh?
On the day before EMC launched our View-based reference architectures, VCE launched their FastPath View solution. What’s the difference?
It’s the core difference between reference architectures and converged infrastructure.
- The View based reference architectures from EMC help reduce risk, a little. They are infinitely flexible – after all, we did it with Cisco switches, but it doesn’t “break” the reference architecture if you choose something else - what is there to break after all? The more you diverge the less value they have, but there’s no line. They are infinitely flexible. Will it accelerate your deployment – sure. A moderate amount. But hey – you could have any servers, any network, and in fact, diverge from the storage config in the doc to scale up or down. It’s “Flexible”. It’s how most IT is acquired and deployed today. If you like this model, you’re like me, and can’t wait to read past the break where we have chart after chart comparing View 4.6 to View 5 under load.
- The View FastPath solution from VCE represents a different consumption model. Sure, it’s a little more rigid – it needs to be within the parameters of a Vblock 300, and comes in 500, 1000, and 1500 user sizing. But, in exchange, you get extreme acceleration. You get a single SKU (including ALL the required software). You get provisioning tools that automatically configure to View and vSphere 5 best practices – in an automated fashion. You get support from one place. Converged infrastructure is less about the ingredients themselves, but rather getting down to business. It’s all about “Acceleration”. It’s how more and more IT is likely to be deployed in the future. If you’re not even REMOTELY interested in the View 4.6/View 5 performance results below, and just need the project to succeed – you’re the kind of person who wants FastPath. More on FastPath in a separate post.
Ok – back to nerdy View 4.6 to View 5 compare and contrast! Read on for more!
These graphs are EARLY based on the build of View 5 we have, but interesting nevertheless. Thank you (and shout out) to the EMC Solutions Group team in RTP!
Storage Processor Throughput Results:
Disk Statistics:
FAST Cache IOps
…There’s a lot more where that came from – you can expect to see a full View 5.0 Reference Architecture posted soon…
Cool stuff – and congrats to the view team!
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