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During the recent VMworld Europe, I’ve got the opportunity to talk with Tony Hampel, Director, Product Marketing of Nexenta about their product for VDI environments. I’ve already met them one year ago, during the past edition of VMworld EU (and also during the Open Storage Summit EMEA 2012) and I’ve also wrote about their product N4V. This was the opportunity to know the news about those months.

Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View (NV4V) is a purpose built virtual storage appliance (VSA) that simplifies deployment and management of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) storage. By integrating with VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter Server, NV4V provides comprehensive functionality, including inline data deduplication and compression, flexible back-up and restore, unlimited snapshots, metadata acceleration and uniform IOPS at any scale.

The storage part of this product it’s based on the well know Nexenta NextStor product but NV4V could work with all this type of storage:

  • local storage: disk locally in each ESXi node, with the power of local resource and in building a compute and storage block
  • 3rd party or NexentaStor based storage arrays (SAN) attached to the ESXi hosts via iSCSI/FC/FCoE
  • bare-metal installed NexentaStor NAS, with two sub-options: existing NFS share, raw disks
  • 3rd party NFS

Of course local storage bring some more considerations about storage and pools design, but you can found more information in this previous post.

Actually NV4V has reach v2.2 (several steps after the first version) with new features and enhancements:

  1. Added Additional ZFS and TXG analytics: these analytics enable NexentaStor to effectively identify storage bottlenecks and what they may be causing them. This also helps us identify current and future performance issues before they happen.
  2. Added a GUI Dashboard Summary: this new feature provides a summary of desktop storage usage pool per desktop. It also demonstrates that the administrator hasn’t over provisioned storage per VM. Through this we can actually see how much compression is taking place. Plus this is another method of storage monitoring outside of vCenter.
  3. vSphere 5.5 Support: NV4V has complete support and compatibility with vSphere 5.5 and will always keep track with the latest vSphere releases.
  4. Added Steady State Benchmarking: This feature gives admins an opportunity to try different configurations before they deploy NV4V with View in a production environment. This is similar to Enterprise Standard LoginVSI Metrics.
  5. Added SAN Accelerator Profile: This is a deployment profile optimized for a specific use case, it accelerates a contested or underperforming SAN.
  6. Enhanced Raw Device Mapping (RDM): We’ve added support for a iSCSI or Fibre Channel LUN as a physical RDM device to the Nexenta VSA. This feature provides Nexenta a competitive advantage for all vSphere versions prior to version 5.5.
  7. Added Access Control List (ACL): This provides for multi-user access and limited permissions. We provide four options: Administrator, Deployment User, Performance Monitoring User, and Read Only User.

As usually the product is also available in a free 45 days trial.

See also the other mine reports from VMworld Europe 2013.

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.