So currently the guys from DinamiQs are deploying a nicely sized VirtualStorm environment as a demo for the Cebit, in co-operation with our gracious reseller host, ForceFusion (www.forcefusion.eu)

The hardware is pretty much overkill, as there is a VMax with 100TB FC and 2TB of EFD there, as well as a whiptail and a greenbytes storage system. A blade center with 11 current dual and quad socket quad core machines and nice big memory.

All of it tied together using an Arista 7148SX with 960Gbit/s backplane speed and low latency, 10gig sfps. (Thanks EMC, Intel, Consolidate-IT and ForceFusion for the hardware ;)

The technology shows some interesting behaviour, as it seems the overall solution is getting faster the more desktops we deploy. This is expected behaviour for larger VirtualStorm environments.

The bottlenecks right now are mostly VirtualCenter, Tomcat and MSSQL. Optimization scripts have allowed vCenter to go up to 4500 machines.

Depending on workload the switch pushes between 100 and 250 Gbit/s through the entire system.

The desktops that have been deployed together result in an application stack of 1125 TB of SWV managed applications.

755 deployed VMs on a dual socket quad core machine (not all running as there is insufficient memory :( )

Access to desktops occurs dinamically through one of the available Panologic devices.

Deployment time for 150 desktops: 3 minutes. (nice boxes... we may keep them...)

With two more days to go there will be some more numbers forthcoming. Also VeeAm has set up a full fledged monitoring environment to see exactly what is going on. So expect something from them as well.

Any questions, feel free to ask...

And for those wondering what some of the hosts-maps look like.... This one has 826 VMs on it...

And because someone asked: this is a dual socket quad core Intel 5530 Dell Blade 610 with -I believe- 32GB of memory.

Two a simple questions -

You have got 755 virtual desktops consuming 1125 TB from your vMAX? It sounds like over sized. Or the 755 VM's is only one of the multiple pods?

What is the VDI stack in use?

1125TB for in total 4500 VMs, not 755.

Let me explain: this is a VirtualStorm VDI setup which shares the application stack (Symantec SWV packaged applications) between all XP desktops. That means that VMware will show more storage than is actually in use. Of course vCenter has some limitiations in displaying such numbers, therefore we have looked with VeeAm to see the actual numbers. Looking at the actual files on the storage we have deployed roughly 9TB, of which 6TB has been aggressively deduped on the Greenbytes box to about 1TB. So 4TB is what we actually have in use for 4500 desktops...

And the V-Max is actually being used for specific workload measurements because EMC has the tooling to look deep down into their systems to see what's going on ;)

We're actually trying to optimize the V-Max for our specific workload to see how large we can build VirtualStorm VDI systems on EMC VMax systems.

The answer's probably going to be: pretty damn big.

And a little extra view of the complete environment. Enjoy it, it took almost 5 minutes to render....

OK, the show is over. All the hardware is back to the respective owners and we are left with many qualified leads and highly interesting data that we are now going to analyze to see where we can optimize further.

The VirtualStorm software infrastructure performed in an outstanding way, well within design parameters, displaying the effects that we had predicted for large scale environments. (ie it gets faster as the environment scales up)

With the specific numbers we have so far seen, we now know that scaling a single environment up to 25000 VirtualStorm VMs is feasible. We expect some more interesting behavior patterns to emerge at that point, which we are going to validate in the lab and probably experiment with in a future trade-show where we have enough hardware available...

A few more images that I only got from the camera just now. Build up of the environment and some pictures of the actual ForceFusion stand and some of the guys that were there.

It was really an awesome show and we have received a lot of interest from all over the world.

Hopefully we can do some announcements during Symantec Vision in Las Vegas, mid April. Should be an interesting week for the VDI world in general.

Jule Slootbeek from EMC, who made it possible to have the VMax on the stand.

Thanks man!

No, I will not fix your computer!

The stuff for the CeBit came in a number of huge crates. This is 1 of them. There were a few more.

Configuring the VMax. Is that Windows XP on the screen there???

Next to the Amazon stand. They may have had a cloud, we had impressive blue lights from the VMax.

And full desktops with extreme density per server. And a lightning fast Arista switch (yay!)

Setting up the PCoIP demo. Required installing the card with the Teradici chip on it. Had some guys over from Amulet Hotkey, they understood their stuff, had the demo up and running in minutes.

A view of vCenter, seeing the hosts and an initial rampup of one of the hosts going up to 600+ VMs. We had some issues with one of the storage boxes, as vCenter does not like 2TB iSCSI LUNs. 2000GB is ok, 2TB does not equal 2000GB. Cryptic error-message, so go figure. We found it eventually.

After that we ramped up the environment to 4550 VMs. Pity we did not have more hosts, running 450+ per host on average is a nice number for the quad core Nehalems.