News
Virsto Introduces a Storage Virtualisation Software for Virtual Desktop Deployments
April 2011 by Marc Jacob
Virsto™ Software, an innovator in storage solutions for virtual computing today introduced Virsto VDI, a hypervisor-based storage virtualisation solution designed to significantly decrease the costs of virtual desktop deployments while improving end users’ desktop experience. Initially supporting Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft VDI running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, Virsto VDI is architected to be storage- and hypervisor-agnostic and enables users to provision and manage thousands of virtual desktops, maximise consolidation of server and storage hardware, and reduce overall storage costs for VDI deployments by more than 70 percent.
Virtual desktop environments differ in significant ways from virtual server environments that are often deployed to meet consolidation objectives and support private cloud initiatives.
In contrast with virtual servers hosting 10-15 virtual machines (VMs), each VDI host typically supports 50-100 virtual desktop images. The more VMs per host, the more acute the I/O performance bottlenecks are. The number of VM images in VDI deployments is orders of magnitude greater, exacerbating the excessive cost from storage over-provisioning. Further, the requirements for frequent and rapid provisioning in VDI highlights the current lack of efficient and flexible provisioning options.
Accelerating VDI Deployments
Specifically designed to decrease the costs and increase the performance of virtual desktop environments, Virsto VDI benefits users by:
· Changing the economics of VDI - by producing a significant increase in storage utilisation with higher VM storage density, reducing storage costs by 70 percent or more, and delivering compelling cost per desktop economics.
· Supporting enterprise-scale VDI – by delivering the only solution that provides unlimited snapshots and thin-provisioned clones to enable projects to scale to thousands of virtual desktops, supporting heterogeneous storage to fully utilise and consolidate existing storage resources and robust, cluster-aware HA and backup.
· Simplifying VDI management – by providing software-driven storage tiering to enable the creation of high performance, yet cost-effective storage solutions, decreasing the provisioning time of thousands of images from hours to minutes, and supporting simple bulk operations and other flexible tools for managing VDI at scale.
Close Alignment and traction with key Partners
Virsto is a Microsoft BizSpark One member, Microsoft Virtualisation partner and Microsoft System Center Alliance partner and fully supports critical Microsoft products and services such as Hyper-V, Virtual Machine Manager, Data Protection Manager, Windows Failover Clusters, and Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Virsto also was named a Best of Tech·Ed 2010 Award Finalist at Microsoft Tech·Ed North America. Virsto is a Citrix Ready Certified Partner and is verified to be compatible with XenDesktop 4 and XenDesktop 5.
– Availability and Pricing
Virsto VDI is now generally available. Pricing for Virsto VDI is $2,800 per host, with 1 TB of logical storage per license.
