MoSMB used in HCI platform to support VDI

MoSMB’s advanced architecture supports high performance and low latency which is ideal for Hyper-V VDI use. In this article, we explore the details of how MoSMB is used in a HCI environment to provide Hyper-V VDI support

MoSMB design is highly flexible and modular with well-defined interface for different module. MoSMB is installed on an enterprise grade, top of line hyper-converged platform with an object store data platform (MoSMB is agnostic to the data storage platform). Aggregated memory, flash and disk resources are shared across a cluster of servers to deliver an optimal cost-effective solution. The VDI solution is “always on”– addition or removal of capacity as well as software upgrades was to be done without downtime.

MoSMB shares are used as Hyper-V VM store and work with Microsoft tools such a Hyper-V Manager and SCVMM. MoSMB supports Hyper-V over SMB use case whereby MoSMB shares can store live virtual machine files, which includes configuration, virtual hard disk (VHDX) files, and snapshots on MoSMB file shares.

The VDI use case is extremely demanding and uses the following features

Asynchronous IO

MoSMB has been built from ground up to incorporate modern architecture principles such as asynchronous, non-blocking, event based architecture for packet handling to achieve highest performance

High Availability

MoSMB supports high availability and the persistent storage module of MoSMB enables maintenance of persistent data (such as open file table) on a high-speed memory.

Active-Active Cluster

MoSMB is deployed as a 3 or 4 node active-active cluster. The SMB3 connection is established to the nearest node in the data cluster so that the VHDX file access is fastest over the network to the MoSMB shares.

ODX copy offload

The VDI use case involves copying very large files, import/export of VMs and VM storage migration. Using the ODX feature, these file operations are offloaded to the storage array bypassing the host computer. This results in higher throughput, lower latency and lower CPU and network resource usage on the host computer.

Microsoft tools like SCVMM

MoSMB shares are made to work with Microsoft tools like SCVMM for manageability.