Participate in any virtual desktop design session and you will know that the discussion almost always moves immediately to how many IOPS per virtual desktop session should be expected. More often than not, the leader of these conversations will answer “it depends”. This is a statement that does not give most end users a warm a fuzzy feeling because it usually comes with a pretty heavy storage price tag. Unfortunately, there are many factors that affect overall performance. Within the virtual desktop session, the number and type of applications you have running, the layers of security configuration and policy that are applied, and how you are handling user personalization have an impact on IOPS.

Virtual Desktop vendors publish reference architectures with lab-tested IOPS results, but few ever really live up to what real-life scenarios produce, and many focus on adding a tier of storage infrastructure that adds to the cost and complexity of managing the virtual desktop environment. The Greenbytes IO Offload Engine looks to tackle the IO performance issue without changes to the storage infrastructure. The SSD appliance-based solution leverages a patented inline primary storage de-dupe technology to reduce boot storms and system swaps up to 20x and has seen total VDI image storage reduction of 80 to 1. It does this by integrating itself with the underlying hypervisor and offloading the golden and replicated disk images and temporary vDisk to its appliance.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.virtualizationpractice.com/greenbytes-addresses-vdi-io-without-changing-your-storage-19729/