An interesting new feature was included with the XenServer 7.1 release: Provisioning Services Accelerator.
In a single sentence,
PVS Accelerator overcomes PVS server and network latency by utilizing local XenServer RAM/Disk resources to cache blocks of a PVS vDisk to fulfill local target VM requests.
Take a look at the demo video to see:
A few things to note:
- Network utilization drops significantly as target VM requests are fulfilled by the local XenServer Cache
- Accelerator should help reduce retries as the network is not as heavily utilized
- Any licensed version of XenApp/XenDesktop has access to this feature
- VM boot time drops significantly.
I did some testing on the last point around boot time. By enabling PVS Accelerator on XenServer 7.1, the boot times dropped by around 60%.
A very nice improvement with integrated technology.
Daniel (Follow on Twitter @djfeller)
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Interesting. How many and what type of VMs?
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[…] already showed that PVS Accelerator drastically improves VM boot times because portions of the master vDisk image are cached locally. Booting a VM equates to roughly […]
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