MSA 2012i and XenServer

[ashley poxon]

Hi,

I recently purchased a MSA 2012 SAN for our infrstructure, and this has 5TB of storage. This serves two ESX 4 hosts. All is working perfectly and am really happy with the product.

We are now looking to implement a citrix xenapp and xendesktop product for a VDI project.

We have asked a citrix gold partner to help with the project. They have suggested that the HP san would need to be replaced with a compellent solution because the HP just won't be able to cope with the Data Ins and Outs IOPS that running this kind of environment requires. On a single SAN volume, there can be many virtual machines. For a server deployments, 10-20 VM's like you have now and for VDI deployments it could be up to 50-70 VMs. So the on-going problem has been how do you ensure each of these VMs has the performance it needs when some VMs are very active and others are not? That’s a valid question for less capable storage systems for most vendors. But a better question is, “How can I provide tier 1 storage storage performance to only the blocks that need it?” Only Compellent can provide a simple answer to that question with their automated tiered storage.

With the HP you just have 1 tier of performance. With the Compellent you have three (two physical tiers of disk types and the fastrack capability of ensuring high performance data is on the fastest spinning part of the disk). In a VDI environment where you have multiple window servers doing various things one size fits all doesn't work. For instance why have a barely used domain controller sitting on the same tier (and taking the same resource) as a constantly used desktop provisioning server?

Is this a valid point or are we being led down the compellent route for no reason?

Thanks