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Apr 28

Future vision of VDI? What if the Hypervisor was cheaper and flexible enough to run on BladePC’s/BladeWS’s – could vMotion/XenMotion then switch on demand?

Blogging, Hardware, Performance Add comments

I am sure this is not really what VMware had in mind when they were touting VMware OnDemand? I’m guessing they had more of an idea that it would combine some of the benefits of ACE with ESX? ;-)

I have just got back from some training in Houston and while listening to a question from a colleague from the UK where he asked if "VDI was going to be able to use the full suite of Hypervisor functionality like vMotion…"  and that got me thinking…

Some of the Conventional Wisdom around the place holds that VDI by itself will likely not be able to cover all of any one customers needs and most will more than likely need to look at quite possibly a number of different approaches to cover ALL employees and ALL Applications.

So with this in mind I’d be interested in your thoughts on the following idea?

Just a few thoughts around VDI??

Let’s say that we stock a couple of decent servers with loads of resources and allows us to run quite a few VDI instances? OK? So one of the possible issues with the classic VDI so far is that if a user places a bit too much pressure on the resources then it has the potential to impact on all other users, being as it is a shared resource? (This is still one of the classic gotcha’s in Terminal Server and Citrix PS – the session is sticky and it stays with the same server unless a logout/login occurs)

So one idea I’m kicking around is the possibility that if a user started something like a 120Mb Excel spreadsheet that might consume quite a bit of CPU then would it be possible to use the vMotion to transfer him to a BladePC, if they started 3 or 4 of them (or they needed more resources?) then transfer them to a BladeWS…..?

Seamlessly!! with the user completely unaware that this has happened!!

Now the fundamentals of vMotion (or XenMotion for that matter?) requires shared boot storage – BUT I don’t think it needs to be NFS or iSCSI, etc. – the Citrix Provisioning Server or OS Streaming method like Neoware IM would probably work just as well in this scenario? As this then leaves the Virtual HardDisk/Storage in a common area accessible by the Vitrual Desktops regardless of whether they are running on VDI’s, the BladePC’s or the BladeWS’s.

The other point is the similarity of CPU would possibly cause an issue, and this probably extends beyond just Intel/AMD? This appears to be a fundamental of vMotion/XenMotion? So this might not fly today, but it is possible that with improvements in the Hypervisors this issue might be overcome at some stage soon?

Anyway, what do you think of the *idea/concept*? As a user requires more CPU and resources they might be able to be transferred from shared resources (VDI on ESX) to individual resources (BladePC) and then high powered resources (BladeWS) – once the high intensity workload has finished then the user would be transferred seamlessly back through the stack to a VDI instance on the ESX server.

Please bear in mind that this is only a concept at the moment and there are clearly problems and issues to be overcome – but the main reason for this post is to ask if you think it has legs? What do you think?

Clearly the ESX/Hypervisor would need to be able to run on hardware outside of it’s current Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) but with Xen this might not be such an issue?

Is wonder if this is where XenDesktop is headed? ;-)

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written by dcaddick


3 Responses to “Future vision of VDI? What if the Hypervisor was cheaper and flexible enough to run on BladePC’s/BladeWS’s – could vMotion/XenMotion then switch on demand?”

  1. 1. Andrew Storrs Says:
    April 28th, 2008 at 8:19 pm

    I could see this working if you were running the same hypervisor on the blade as on the shared system (costs aside). Then the problem with HALs and HBAs etc wouldn’t be an issue, but the CPU type would need to be the same on both systems (which might be a problem as you would probably be using high-end processors on the shared ESX boxes but looking for cheaper solutions on the stand-alones… interesting idea nonetheless.

  2. 2. dcaddick Says:
    April 28th, 2008 at 9:25 pm

    Thanks Andrew,

    I know there are going to be issues and essentially I think we can safely say that this won’t work today – but all I’m asking is if this is a cool concept? And I think the issues aren’t too hard to overcome really (not simple to be sure) but not that hard either?

    Let’s see what Citrix releases on the 20th?

    Dave

  3. 3. Michael Keen Says:
    May 1st, 2008 at 10:10 pm

    David

    I put in my blog that this was something I was tossing around just from a Citrix session perspective, “migrating on the fly a user session from one XenApp server to another”. Now with the introduction of vMotion/XenMotion this opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. This is a very cool concept and I’m sure someone in the deepest, darkest bowels of Citrix are thinking about this with XenServer.

    You pose an interesting thought and there are some challenges to deal with, but I think this might have some legs.

    Cheers

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