Mellanox Technologies and LSI Corporation have collaborated on a solution for enabling greater virtual desktop density per server using VMware Horizon View. The combined low-latency solution consists of a Mellanox 40GbE NICs and the LSI Nytro MegaRAID application acceleration card that uniquely integrates onboard flash capacity with intelligent caching software and hard drive RAID management. The integrated application acceleration solution is designed to provide users with a lower cost alternative to traditional storage solutions. With a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workload, the joint solution supports up to 1,500 desktops across 10 vSphere servers.
To evaluate this solution supporting a VMware Horizon View environment, a pair of white box servers was used with the Mellanox 40GbE end-to-end solution and LSI Nytro card. Since enterprise environments demand no single point of failure, the performance overhead of supporting a highly available configuration was measured. A detailed paper on tested configuration is available here.
