VMware Horizon View 5.2 – Storage Enhancements

Last week saw VMware release the latest version of VMware View, VMware Horizon View 5.2. While there are a whole bunch of enhancements in this release, I wanted to focus on a few enhancements that are specifically storage related. I’ve covered some of these in the past from a vSphere perspective, but now we have a new release of View which can take advantage of these features.

Tintri adds new VM-aware features and VAAI Support

During VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up once again with the team from Tintri. My first introduction to Tintri was at last year’s VMworld, where they received runner-up in the ‘Hardware for Virtualization’ category by TechTarget for best of VMworld 2011. Well this year they went one better, and won the Best of VMworld 2012 Gold award in Hardware for Virtualization. And for good reason. Let’s see the enhancements to the Tintri platform over the last 12 months have brought.  

vSphere 5.1 Storage Enhancements – Part 2: SE Sparse Disks

This is possibly the most exciting new storage feature in the vSphere 5.1 release. Space Efficient Sparse Virtual Disks (or SE Sparse Disks for short) were designed to alleviate two issues. Let’s describe these issues first of all. Problem Statement #1 – Let’s take a Guest OS running on a linked clone (View desktop if you will), and this Guest OS issues a 4KB write. vmfsSparse disk (which is the format used by traditional linked clones) has a block allocation unit size of 512 bytes. In other words, this Guest OS is backed by 512 byte blocks. Depending on the…