Technical data

Solution Technology Overview
VMware Horizon View 5.3 and VMware vSphere for up to 2,000 Virtual
Desktops Enabled by Brocade Network Fabrics, EMC VNX, and EMC Next-
Generation Backup
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EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) for VMware vSphere is a plug-in to the
vSphere client that provides a single management interface that is used
for managing EMC storage within the vSphere environment. Features can
be added and removed from VSI independently, which provides flexibility
for customizing VSI user environments. Use the VSI Feature Manager to
manage the features. VSI provides a unified user experience that allows
new features to be introduced rapidly in response to changing customer
requirements.
The following features were used during the validation testing:
 Storage Viewer—extends the functionality of the vSphere Client
to facilitate the discovery and identification of EMC VNX storage
devices that are allocated to VMware vSphere hosts and virtual
machines. Storage Viewer presents the underlying storage details
to the virtual datacenter administrator, merging the data of
several different storage mapping tools into a few seamless
vSphere Client views.
 Unified Storage Management—Simplifies storage administration
of the EMC VNX unified storage platform. It enables VMware
administrators to seamlessly provision new Network File System
(NFS) and Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastores and
RDM volumes within the vSphere Client.
Refer to the EMC VSI for VMware vSphere product guides on EMC Online
Support for more information.
Hardware acceleration with VMware vStorage API for Array Integration
(VAAI) is a storage enhancement in vSphere that enables vSphere to
offload specific storage operations to compatible storage hardware such
as the VNX series platforms. With storage hardware assistance, vSphere
performs these operations faster and consumes less CPU, memory, and
storage fabric bandwidth.
Compute layer
The choice of a server platform for an EMC VSPEX infrastructure is not only
based on the technical requirements of the environment, but also on the
supportability of the platform, existing relationships with the server provider,
advanced performance and management features, and many other
factors. For this reason, EMC VSPEX solutions are designed to run on a wide
variety of server platforms. Instead of requiring a given number of servers
with a specific set of requirements, VSPEX documents a number of
processor cores and an amount of RAM that must be achieved. This can
be implemented with 2 servers (or 20) and still be considered the same
VSPEX solution.
For example, let us assume that the compute layer requirements for a
given implementation are 25 processor cores and 200 GB of RAM. One
EMC Virtual
Storage
Integrator for
VMware
VNX VMware
vStorage API for
Array Integration
Support