1. VESK
James Mackie (MD)
How to Launch a Successful
VDI Hosted Service using
OpenStorage and Citrix
XenDesktop

2. Quick idea on the VDI market
Quick idea of the VDI market
There's a lot of facts and figures on virtualisation, people tend to confuse
these figures around server, desktop and application virtualisation. So here
are some real figures on VDI
The leading 5 desktop outsourcing companies in Europe are:
HP
Atos
IBM
CSC
Fujitsu
Leading 5 manage 13 million desktops
Of which now 1.4m are virtual desktops
So it's safe for us to say around 10 of desktops are virtual

3. VDI
Firstly I just wanted to elaborate on the title, "how to launch a successful VDI hosted service“
There's now many different types of VDI. But it's important to differentiate and recognise
between them as there seems to be a lot of confusion.
Internal VDI deployments (Private Cloud)
Usually consists of a cloud specialist consulting a large corporate
Popular with large organisations who can afford the CapEx and have the in-house
technical knowledge
HVD, hosted virtual desktops (Public Cloud)
TOTAL cloud, consumes all applications and data
DAAS cloud connect (Hybrid Cloud)
Non persistent
Cyber security
Interconnect required
VESK (Virtual Private Cloud)
Giving users their own control of their VDI

4. Case study
VESK case study: Brixton council
550 users
185 applications
Security & compliance
Green Government CSR’s
The problem we had
IOPS. Microsoft say virtual desktops require 5-25 IOPS, we have seen desktops take 100
IOPS

5. Recent Storage implementation
Head nodes
HA / failover
RAIDz2 JBOD’s
SSD’s
- Mirrored ZIL’s
- L2ARC
72 x 2TB drives
Over 140TB raw
1gbps switch
10gbps connect
6 gbps SAS
cables
14U
Low power
5

6. Problems encountered
 Upgrade to Nexenta 3.1
 How many of you guys have upgraded to 3.1 ?
 Excellent new features, for us it's all about autosync pausing
 Now we don't have to resync 100's of TB of data over our interconnect
 Issues
 zpool needed upgrading
 some disk groups didn't copy across successfully
 Disk names became missing and state DEGRADED
 Pause on hourly sync, just a 3 second glitch
 Future expansion
 We just add a new SAN
 May mirror in future instead of RAIDz2
 Why not dedup ? 2GB of RAM per TB of storage required