Sun VDI for JavaOne

Sun VDI Software 3 @ JavaOne

Throughout JavaOne each and every of the participants has access to three personal desktops running Windows, Ubuntu, and OpenSolaris. All virtual machines are hosted on Sun VirtualBox servers and stored on Sun's Unified Storage platform. Sun's desktop virtualization product Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 3 is used to manage the virtual machines and deliver the desktop to the Ultra Thin Clients called Sun Ray clients.

Introduction

Each participant can access the internet through the public conference WiFi or through Sun Ray clients at various spots around the Moscone Center. Each participant simply has to insert his conference Java Card into one of the terminals in order to obtain a session with internet access. The underlying technology provides access to a variety of different operating systems such as

• OpenSolaris 2009.06
• Ubuntu 8.10
• Windows 7 RC

During the whole week participants own this selection of desktops. Each desktop is completely isolated and acts as a virtual personal computer. Every time the user inserts his card, he gets access to the same selection of desktops that has been assigned at first use. Based on the card information participants will get also access to personalized information, such as their conference schedule. Hence a level of customization is applied to each desktop. Participants are also able to switch between desktops.

In total the trade show group handles about 21.000 desktops. This is a new dimension in virtual desktop management. It is a challenge in terms or management of the sheer amount of desktops as well as handling the storage capacity needed to host 21.000 virtual desktop images with an average amount of 10 GB per individual image. This sums up to a total of 210 TB.

Sun VDI Software 3 actually uses a number of smart techniques. First of all not all of the desktops run in parallel. As there are about 150 Sun Ray clients around the conference, there is a maximum of about 150 - 200 active desktops at any point in time. Other desktops are suspended to save resources.
The way this is organized is quite simple. When a user inserts his card and selects a certain desktop, the desktop is started or resumed from a previous usage. When a user finally removes his card, the desktop is suspended, meaning they are stopped and their current state is stored to disk. This behavior reduces the total requirement for CPU and memory quite dramatically.

A similar approach is used on the storage side. Instead of creating 21,000 full disk images in advance, Sun VDI Software 3 just stores 3 complete desktop images - one image per operating system. The images are used as templates. Based on these templates there are a couple of thousand sparse desktop clones created. These clones reference their template and grow only when participants start using the desktop. This efficient cloning technique leverages unique capabilities of Solaris' filesystem ZFS, that are exposed by the recently announced Unified Storage Systems. If you want to find out more about the architecture of Sun VDI Software 3, take a look at the Sun VDI Software Getting Started Guide.

VDI Architecture at JavaOne

For the conference we are using a relatively small setup compared to the number of desktops to be hosted, that focuses on responsiveness of the desktops, sized for an upper limit of 400 to 500 desktops running at the same time.

The illustration above shows the general architecture. Just the 150 Sun Ray clients are omitted that are connected through a private interconnect with the 4 VDI core servers, responsible for the session handling. Here we are using 4 Sun Fire X4450, each with 4 CPUs and 64 GB memory. This is well enough for the session handling and virtual desktop management.

The virtualization layer is equipped with 5 Sun Fire X4450 servers, each 4 CPUs, 6 cores per CPU and 64 GB of memory. These servers run Sun VirtualBox hosting the virtual desktops. Each of these virtualization hosts is able to handle about 100 desktops.

And finally we are using 3 * 7210 Unified Storage servers. These are about 120TB of storage. This is much more, than we have ever need for this number of desktops. However, for the conference we focused on throughput. Specifically for the situation, when thousands of participants run out of a general session and quickly want to check their schedule or email. This implies many simultaneous starts, stops, resumptions or suspension of desktops, all very I/O intensive. Therefore we spread the load and throughput on 3 machines rather than one. In general a single 7210 is able to handle the load of more than 1000 desktops running in parallel. Check out our sizing information for more detail.

The solution has been built to provide a good level of availability. Both the session and the virtualization layer can tolerate host failures. A failure of a storage host will lead into a loss of the virtual desktop image. The user would get a new image on a different storage host. This is acceptable for a conference. But for an enterprise deployment you would need to cluster the storage backend. A solution with a clustered 7310 Unified Storage system would be more appropriate in this case.

If you want to find out more about how to deploy and size Sun VDI Software 3, please have a look into the deployment guide.

Summary

The Sun VDI Software deployment for JavaOne demonstrates the capabilities of a highly integrated and flexible virtual desktop management system. It leverages the power of the underlying hardware and focuses on the administration and configuration of the backend. The clients are completely stateless and are not managed as such. All administration happens in the backend. Sun VDI Software 3 provides users with a choice of desktops on the one hand, while reducing the complexity on the backend quite dramatically with it's 3-tier self-contained approach (session, virtualization, storage).