ThinKiosk 4.5 is a big update, so without further ado, lets get right to it:

ThinKiosk Broker Service:

• HA features are now available in the ThinKiosk Broker.
• The Broker service can now utilise Microsoft SQL for the database and an easy migration utility can be utilised to do so.
• Brokers can now be load balanced via Citrix Netscaler or Microsoft DNS round robin.
• The ThinKiosk Broker can now deliver software updates directly to clients.
• The ThinKiosk Broker can now authenticate against active directory.

ThinKiosk Client:

• The ThinKiosk receiver functionality has been moved to the applications tab in our new ThinScale Connector functionality.
• The Client can now communicate directly with Microsoft RDS Broker services. Allowing customers using Microsoft RDS or VDI to use ThinKiosk to connect, enumerate and launch resources within ThinKiosk, without RDP files.
• The Client now supports password changing and legal notices for the ThinScale Connector.
• The Client now supports “auto launch” logic to specify which desktops to auto launch on logon.
• The Client now starts up at least 40% quicker than previous versions.
• The Client’s communication logic has been redesigned to allow management even when nobody is logged in.
• The Client now supports central software updates from the Broker, allowing push software updates.
• The Client now has an authentication API for use with Imprivata tap and go cards or similar technology.
• The Client is now smart enough to detect DNS round robin when connecting to a Broker and will use the list retrieved from DNS as a broker list to try when starting up.
• The Clients will delete stale or old user profiles periodically to keep machines clean.
• Many, many improved administrative features allowing ease of access to the system for administrators.

We’re extremely proud of this update and we look forward to hearing from you!

• ThinIO facts and figures, Part 1: VDI and Ram caching.
• ThinIO facts and figures, Part 2: The Bootstorm chestnut.
• ThinIO facts and figures, Part 3: RDS and Ram caching.

In the final blog post in this series, we’re going to discuss storage design and a frequent problem face when sizing storage. Lets get right into it:

“Designing for average, is designing for failure”

Peak IOPS:1015, Average IOPS: 78

A frequent mistake I see customers and consultants alike make is taking an average of a sizing requirement and using that as a baseline for sizing environments.

Looking at the figures produced from our internal load tests, we saw just an average of 78 IOPS required on write from a vanilla server without ThinIO to provide storage from this XenApp server.

Now frequently, people will take a figure like that, throw in 25% for growth and bob’s your uncle, ‘order the hardware Mr SAN man’. When I have questioned them about that assumption, they’ll often respond “oh it will be a bit slow if theres contention but it’ll even itself out”.

Right? Wrong.

Things don’t go slow when they are over subscribed, they stop.

Don’t take my word for it! Lets do some simple theoretical math:

If you take a storage device and allocate 100 IOPS to this machine, what’s going to happen when a peak like 1000 IOPS is requested? A lot of queuing. 

In theory, keeping to the 100 IOPS figure, that 1 second burst IO is now taking over 10 seconds to satisfy (1000 / 10).

But it gets worse, all subsequent IO that is requested after that spike occurred is going to also be haulted waiting for this task to occur.

Assuming you’re now mid spike and 10 seconds later the request is finished… taking your average figure, you now have 10 seconds worth of 100 IO’s per second potentially queued up behind…

Low and behold another login occurs and? STOP. Storage timeouts, twirly whirlies, application crashes, hour glasses and the good old “logins are slow”.

Oh ok, So how do I size to accommodate this? 

Well you’re between a rock and a hard place aren’t you. You can’t tell users when to login, the price tag of a SAN sized for peak activity + 20% is going to cost you more than your entire desktop estate. And as you can see, it’s never safe to assume it will run slow. 

Buying into shared storage is a tricky business 

Storage is expensive. Very expensive. It always annoys me when you hear vendors in this space refering to themselves as ‘reassuringly expensive’. To me this directly translates to ‘We can charge what we want, so we will and you can be reassured we feel the price tag is worth it.’

Storage was never written with desktop workloads in mind, it was written for ‘steady state’ server workloads and was in the progress of going the way of the ‘dodo’ (extinct) up until that first release of vMotion requiring shared storage, which some say was the saving of the market.

Many vendors are going with software or hardware intelligent tiering. This is a great feature, but the real question to ask is how frequently data is moved from the hot tier to lower tier? Press your vendor on this as they more than likely wont know! Microsoft storage spaces is a prime example of this with a really poor optimisation process of just once a day!

Then ask yourself what happens when a base image update occurs and changes the disk layout of the base golden image? Further, stateless technologies from the bigger vendors delete the differencing disk on restart, can you be sure the new disk is going to end up in the smaller, faster SSD or RAM tier? Or is data up there already in contention?

RAM is far less tricky

RAM is commodity, available in abundance and throughout every virtual desktop project I’ve architected and deployed, you run out of CPU resources in a ‘fully loaded’ host way before you will run out of RAM. RAM has no running maintenance cost, Ram is an upfront CAPEX cost and requires little to no maintenance.

The beauty of what ThinIO does with the little resources you assign it, is turn that desktop workload into a healthier and happier server workload of minimal burst IO and a low steady state IO requirement.

Note the peak of just 40.5 IOPS and average IOPS of less than 2.

with as little as just 200mb cache for each of the 10 users logging in, within an aggressive 3 minute window, we reduced the peak from 1000 to 40. That’s a 96% reduction in burst IO.

With ThinIO, you:

• reduce your exposure to massive IO spikes.
• Improve user logon times.
• significantly reduce your daily IOPS run rate.
• Increase user productivity by spending less time waiting for the storage.
• Commit to nothing up front, test it and see how well it works. If you are happy, then buy in.

Lots of Intelligence baked in:

ThinIO is acutely aware of key operating system events that will cause these kind of spikes and react accordingly to reduce the spikes in IOPS created. ThinIO constantly watches the behavior and IO pattern of the storage and tunes itself accordingly.

Unlike other technologies, ThinIO is a true caching and performance solution. We do not move useful data in and out of the cache on demand when cache availability is contencious. We track patterns and frequency of block access to respond accordingly, delivering all the benefits we have mentioned, even with the tiniest cache, without EVER reducing the capability of the storage when overwhelmed.

And on the opposite side of the scale, when underworked, we leverage our cache to deliver deeper read savings as above.

ThinIO also has a powerful API and PowerShell interface to allow you to report and interact with the cache on demand.

Wrap up:

And with the end of the series looming, allow me to finish on some easy points:

 ThinIO Allows you to:

• size your SAN outside of the Lamborghini category & price tag for your desktop estate.
• rapidly achieve far deeper density on your current hardware when you are feeling the Pinch.
• guarantee a level of performance by assigning cache per VM, disallowing other users to steal or hamper caching resources.
• Improve user experience and login times immediately.
• Reduce the impact of boot storms and similar IO storm scenarios.

No other vendor can offer as quick a turn around time with their product. ThinIO installs in seconds and offers a huge range of compatibility.

One more thing:

In case you missed ThinIO’s launch day at E2EVC Barcelona, ThinIO is now in GA, available from our website and production ready! More marketing to follow! But grab your copy now and get playing!

To recap, below you will find the previous articles:

• ThinIO facts and figures, Part 1: VDI and Ram caching.
• ThinIO facts and figures, Part 2: The Bootstorm chestnut.

Off topic note:

two years ago at an E2EVC event, the concept behind ThinIO was born with just a mad scientist idea amongst peers.

If you are lucky enough to be attending E2EVC this weekend, David and I will be there presenting ThinIO and maybe, just maybe there will be an announcement. Our session is on Saturday at 15:30 so pop by, you won’t be disappointed.

Back on topic:

So here’s a really interesting blog post. Remote Desktop Services (XenApp / XenDesktop hosted shared) or whatever you like to call it. RDS really presents a fun caching platform for us, as it allows us to deal with a much higher IO volume and achieve deeper savings.

We’ve really tested the heck out of this platform for how we perform on Microsoft RDS, Horizon View RDS integration and Citrix XenSplitPersonality with Machine Creation Services.

The figures we are sharing today are based on the following configuration and load test:

• Citrix XenDesktop 7.6
• Windows Server 2012 r2
• Citrix User Profile Manager.
• 16gb of Ram.
• 4 vCpu.
• LoginVSI 4.1 medium workload 1 hour test.
• 10 users.
• VMFS 5 volume.

Fun figures!

Diving straight in, lets start by looking at the volume of savings across three cache types.

Reviewing the details for a moment:

Running repetitive tests of at least 3 per cache type, we found even at the lowest entry point we would support (50mb per user) we saw phenomenal savings of over 70% on write IO.

No pressure no diamonds!

To put that into perspective, at a 512 MB cache for 10 users, our cache reached maximum capacity at the second user login. With 8 users still left to login, cache full and still an hours worth of load testing left, our ThinIO technology was under serious pressure.

This is key to why ThinIO is such a great solution. We won’t just perform great until we fill our cache, we don’t require architecture changes or care about your storage type, we have no lead times or install days, we will carry on to work with what is available to use, to take a large ammount of pressure off storage IOPS and data throughput.

With the figures above, you can see just how well the intelligence behind our cache can scale even when it faces such a steep workload.

Below you will find a breakdown of each test:

512 MB cache:

Breaking down into the figures, on the 512mb cache test, it’s clear to see just how well ThinIO deals with the tiniest of caches:

When we side by side this with our baseline averages, you can see we take a huge chunk out of that Spiky login pattern and continue to  reduce the steady state IO as the test continues:

So lets move up and see how we get on!

1024 mb cache:

Doubling up our cache size we see a great increase in both read and write savings as you’d expect.

With 100mb of cache per user, and the average user profile in the test 3 times that size. We are still under pressure. As we will natively favour optimisations to write IO over read, you’ll see the bulk of improvements happen in write when we’re under pressure as illustrated in this test:

With more cache available during the peak IO point, we make further savings on write:

2048 mb cache:

and at our recommended value of 200mb per user in Remote Desktop Services, the results are phenomenal! With this size, even still below the 300mb mark per user profile, the read IO gets a really good boost and the write IO saving well over the 95% mark!

And the side by side comparison is every bit as good as the savings illustrated above, reducing that peak bursty IO to just 41 IOPS:

But there’s more! 

As i pointed out in the previous blog, IOPS are just one side of the story. A reduction of data throughput to the disk is also a big benefit when it comes to storage optimisation, and as you can see we make a big difference:

Wrap up:

So there you have it, with ThinIO, a simple, in VM solution, you can you seriously reduce your IO footprint, boost user performance and achieve greater storage density per virtual machine or on Remote Desktop Services technology.

In the mean time:

If you would like a chance to test ThinIO pre-release, find access to the public beta below. Thank you for your time and happy testing!

Test, test, review and tune. Rinse and repeat!

We’ve spent months load testing, tuning, fixing and retesting ThinIO. And for the first time we’re going to start talking about the dramatic results ThinIO can have on storage scalability and user perceived performance.

During our extensive testing cycles, we’ve covered:

• Horizon View
• Citrix XenDesktop
• Microsoft RDS

We’ve been seeing very similar, if not identical results when testing against pools on the following storage types too:

• XenServer SR
• VMFS
• NFS
• Microsoft Clustered Shared Volumes

For reference the statistics we’re sharing today are based on VDI via VMware Horizon View 6, these figures are averages across at least three independent tests. All details of the tests that exported these results are covered below.

Testing details:

The VM’s we tested in this particular workload are as follows:

• Testing Method: Login VSI 4.1 Medium Workload
• Operating System: Windows 7 x64 SP1
• System ram: 3gb
• vCPU: 2
• ThinIO cache: 350mb
• Technology:  VMware Horizon View 6
• Test runtime: 1 hour*
• Statistic sample period: 5 seconds.

With that out of the way, lets jump right in!

Storage IO:

The number of IO’s per second is crucially important when dealing with storage; many, many small IO’s sent to sparse locations on disk are a killer to storage technologies, only made worse by certain file systems.

As a storage acceleration and negation technology, were extremely happy with the IO’s reduction we see on the storage:

Even with just 350 MB of ram as a cache, we achieve phenomenal IO reduction.

Storage MB / Sec:

But IO’s are just one part of the puzzle, what about the size of the data requests being sent to the storage?

A true solution to take the pressure off the SAN, improve user performance, and increase storage density needs to tackle both the IO and the throughput problem.

As you can see above, with just 350mb we’re very good at it!

Side by Side Comparison:

So rounded figures are fine so long as the data is trustworthy, but here’s a real preview laid bare for your analysis.

Here’s a direct comparison on NFS and VMFS of taking a standard load test IO pattern and comparing it to an identical test with ThinIO installed in the VM:

VMFS:

NFS:

As you can imagine, we’re extremely proud of what we can achieve with as little as 350mb per desktop.

The beauty of our approach is simplicity, your users can see this benefit not in a matter of weeks, days or even hours. ThinIO can be up and running in minutes, delivering reduced login times, storage acceleration and providing a far deeper density on your current storage.

Wrap up:

So there you have it, we’ll be adding additional blog posts in the coming days looking at Remote Desktop Services / XenApp, intelligent cache management built in and our Read Ahead technology, so check back. In the mean time, if you would like a chance to test ThinIO pre-release, find access to the public beta below. Thank you for your time and happy testing!

* Eight-hour figures and complete statistics are also available, we have nothing to hide and we’d encourage you to get in touch with the ThinScale team and we’ll share them with you.

For those unfortunate enough to miss synergy or our Webinar with Erik over at XenAppBlog, here’s a little blog post you will find interesting as I walk you through the inners of ThinIO and why it’s so simple to deliver disk access with RAM speeds without any of the complexity.

What is ThinIO?

ThinIO is a filter driver which operates at a block level, inline between the windows and the disk.

ThinIO sits in the operating system layer and can be used on windows desktop operating systems or server based computing models.

ThinIO delivers a greatly reduced IO footprint on your storage, while also speeding up core items like boot times and login times. ThinIO also helps standardize the peaks your storage will get hit by at busy periods during the day. Ultimately this allows you to size your storage for an average, as opposed to sizing for the worst case scenario during peaks.

How does it work?

When ThinIO starts up, it allocates a configurable cache of reserved RAM to perform its optimisations.

Being the last filter in the stack, ThinIO can still allow windows to perform it’s own optimisation on IO, delivering value by catching the read and write IO’s just as they hit the disk.

ThinIO interacts with block data as read’s and writes traverse the cache. As a read is observed it is retrieved from disk and subsequently stored for future use, meaning any subsequent read will be served directly from cache.

But read’s a boring, and everyone has a solution for read caching. ThinIO also treats this RAM cache as a storage area for write IO. Write IO is committed nearly instantly to the cache and no IO is sent down to the disk while free space is available in the cache.

“But what about if the machines run out of RAM?”

Well I’m glad you asked! The cache in ThinIO is hard set at a value you configure, so RAM will never be taken from the cache to service other processes. But in the situation where the cache has become 100% volatile write, ThinIO will then begin to spill over to the local disk allowing the Virtual Machine continue to operate.

There’s more, ThinIO actively manages cache contents to ensure it’s as relevant as possible. As the cache begins to fill, ThinIO’s Lazy Page Writer can identify and flush out blocks that have not been frequently used. This allows you to use a relatively small cache size while still deliver the big numbers we’ll discuss later.

Designed to be fool proof:

ThinIO’s GUI is fool proof, it’s intuitive and gives you a really quick view of ThinIO Realtime. ThinIO provides graphical representations of stats on reads, writes and cache usage, as well as an immediate view of the benefit ThinIO has created for the desktop.

The ThinIO console can also remotely connect to machines to ensure you don’t have to disturb the user while checking performance.

When the cache is enabled, ThinIO also has a realtime statistics window to help you identify disk patterns and cache performance

Boot and application launch time optimization:

ThinIO has some really clever technology built in to optimise the windows boot process and user experience.

During early testing, we observed just how inefficiently windows uses its disk resources during the boot process. Regularly the same files are requested over and over again on boot, if these blocks are non-contiguous, seek times are inherent. Busy servers were requesting up to 80,000 read IOPS during boot and process start.

ThinIO’s Read Ahead feature allows you to teach windows to be less of a storage monster. As the ThinIO cache is already aware of all blocks needed to boot, or even serve the users first launch of their applications, Read Ahead allows you to boot the machine, with a preloaded cache of required blocks, sorted contiguously.

When ThinIO starts up, it identifies the ‘Read Ahead’ configuration file and pauses windows while it reads the required blocks once, in a contiguous pattern around the disk. Once finished, windows continues to boot retrieving the majority of its block data directly from cache.

By doing this, ThinIO was delivering roughly 30% improved boot times while also reducing boot IOPS by over 80% in our testing. In the below graphs, we did a side by side comparison of the windows start-up process with and without ThinIO.

In the Gui below you will see a machine with the ThinIO cache enabled but no read ahead configured, we achieve a good 40% reduction of IOPS on boot and login, which is not bad on it’s own, but we knew we could make it better:

So after configuring a ‘Read Ahead’ configuration by booting a machine, logging in, opening the core set of applications and committing the file we see the following, large improvement of IOPS saving and cache hit rate on read:

So there you have it. By taking an additional 3-4 minutes with your golden image, you reduce nearly 30,000 IOPS to roughly 5,000 IOPS while also reducing boot times. Not only have you taken alot of pressure off your storage, if you launched your users applications core files as part of the read ahead configuration, your user’s login speeds will receive a really good boost while making their application launch times near instant.

Once the read ahead is complete, the driver will then start to use the data which is no longer needed for more chatty blocks of read or write, so configuring read ahead has zero impact on cache usage in the longer term.

Deploy, size, done.

Out of box, ThinIO takes less than 5 minutes to install and configure delivering you immediate benefits. No hoping, trusting or praying the hardware vendor’s figures are correct. No SAN or LUN type requirement, no hardware lead time, no hypervisor requirements and no change needed to your architecture. Whether you are doing on premises or even cloud SaaS / DaaS, ThinIO installs without any change.

Licensing:

ThinIO will ship with a 30 day grace period for you to test to your heart’s content without any commitment. If ThinIO is not for you, it’s just a matter of uninstalling it! Keeping in the spirit of the community, ThinIO will even have a free version available!

Ultimately, designing and deploying virtual desktops is difficult, we really wanted to write a product that both delivers and is simple and easy to deploy. We feel we’ve absolutely hit the mark on this and we look forward to opening the program to full deployment in the coming weeks.

Sounds great, how do I learn more?

Head on over to the ThinScale Technology web page and read more or register for the private beta.

Well we’ve been busy! Very, very busy. In the next week you will see the culmination of  two years work on a product we’re about to release called ThinIO.

Cast your mind back if you will to some ramblings and napkin math I devised some time ago in my series on IOPS negation strategies:

IOPS, Shared Storage and a Fresh Idea. (Part 1)
IOPS, Shared Storage and a Fresh Idea. (Part 2)
IOPS, Shared Storage and a Fresh Idea. (Part 3)

In these post’s a bunch of community guys ( Barry Schiffer, Iain Brighton, Ingmar Verheij, Kees Baggerman, Remko Weijnen and Simon Pettit) devised a cunning plan during E2EVC to see if we could counter the monotony of IOPS and their devastating impact on Virtual Desktop implementations. We threw together a loose test scenario where we could demonstrate how technology from Microsofts Windows Embedded Standard functionality EWF (Extended Write Filter) and Citrix’s XenServer intellicache with explosive performance and IO reduction statistics.

This blog series got way more attention than we possibly hoped and judging by citrix’s response by adding ram caching and disk overflow in Citrix provisioning services… we were definitely listened to. At the end of the series, I elluded to a technology that could be leveraged to achieve some of this, while right, it has taken along time to get right! With the help of our newest collaborator David Coombes, this technology is very much alive and ready for use.

Here’s the kicker:

Next week at Citrix Synergy, we’re dropping some big news for this market, we’re releasing a product that will deliver insanely fast IOPS to any storage utilising inexpensive RAM. With our product, no architecture change is required, no san volume dependencies, no expensive hardware upgrades and no hypervisor gotcha’s. ThinIO works with all major desktop virtualisation products like XenApp, XenDesktop, VDI in a Box, Microsoft Remote Desktop technologies and even VMware Horizon View!

ThinIO is just a simple installation and off you go. Not only will this product reduce, standardise and improve the speed of IOPS, it will also optimise and reduce boot storms dramatically.

Register for XenAppBlogs webinar here where we’ll discuss how ThinIO works for the first time or come visit us in Citrix Synergy (Booth 513) to celebrate the culmination of 2 years of work and learn how ThinIO is performant, reliable and an extremely cost effective method to deliver lightning fast experience to your users while protecting your disk storage from grinding to a halt.

Watch this space.

Register for Xenappblogs webinar with ThinScale Technology for the official launch of ThinIO