User data is the end-user data or home-directory data. In a virtual desktop environment, the home directory data located in a NetApp volume is shared through the CIFS protocol and is mapped as a drive letter in the virtual desktop. User data often requires backup and recovery as well as disaster recovery. Using CIFS home directory brings more efficiency in the management and protection of user data. End-user data files should be deduplicated and compressed to achieve storage efficiency to reduce the overall solution cost.

Since each data type of a virtual desktop has a different purpose, therefore each data type also has different requirements. Separating the different components of a virtual desktop allows the administrator to create a stateless or nonpersistent virtual desktop environment. This deemphasizes the importance of the operating system and corporate installed applications within the virtual machine and allows administrators to focus on the end user, their experience, and their data. This end-user-centric focus allows administrators to deliver a higher quality “desktop-like” experience with data center benefits such as security, compliance, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery.

Sizing for CIFS home directories should be done as a separate workload from the virtual desktop workload. The storage resource needs for CIFS home directories will be highly variable and dependent on the needs of the users and applications in the environment.

CIFS share has 20% read, 25% write and 55% meta data IOs.

The addition of CIFS profile management had an effect of taking some workload off of the write cache. LoginVSI heavy tests showed three IOPs per desktop were removed from write cache and served from CIFS. The additional four IOPs per desktop seen on the CIFS side were composed of metadata operations (open/close, getattr, lock).

I will discuss user profile management next blog.