Technical data

Solution Architectural 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

Figure 22. VMware virtual disk types

VMFS

VMFS is a cluster file system that provides storage virtualization optimized

for virtual machines. It can be deployed over any SCSI-based local or

network storage.

Raw device mapping

VMware also provides a mechanism called raw device mapping (RDM),

which uses a Fibre Channel or iSCSI protocol and allows a virtual machine

to have direct access to a volume on the physical storage.

NFS

VMware supports using NFS file systems from an external NAS storage

system or device as a virtual machine datastore.

Sizing the storage system to meet virtual server IOPS is a complicated

process. When an I/O reaches the storage array, several components,

such as the Data Mover (for file-based storage), SPs, back-end dynamic

random access memory (DRAM) cache, FAST Cache (if used), and disks,

serve that I/O. Customers must consider various factors when planning and

scaling their storage system to balance capacity, performance, and cost

for their applications.

VSPEX uses a building block approach to reduce complexity. A building

block is a set of disk spindles that can support a certain number of virtual

desktops in the VSPEX architecture. Each building block combines several

disk spindles to create a storage pool that supports the needs of the

private cloud environment. Each building block storage pool, regardless of

the size, contains two flash drives with FAST VP storage tiering to enhance

metadata operations and performance.

VSPEX storage

building block