Big Updates with Turbonomic 6.4 – vSAN/HCI and Horizon VDI

The Turbonomic team has been working hard on some excellent features in the most recent Turbonomic 6.4 release. As a long-time VMware vExpert and advocate for the virtualization community, I’m especially excited about two very slick additions for VMware vSAN and VMware Horizon VDI which I’ve been testing out and loving the results!

We have a lot to share at the VMworld event which I’ll be attending and if you aren’t able to join me there in San Francisco, I have a great team presenting in Barcelona, plus you can always check out the Turbonomic Resources page for videos, blogs, and other updates.

VMware vSAN and VMware HCI

There is little doubt that Hyperconverged infrastructure is becoming much more widely used. vSAN introduces some great new deployment patterns and also changes the way that you need to plan how to build and operate in order to get the best out of HCI and the vSAN distributed storage platform.  I’m writing this as I wait to board a flight to VMworld 2019 so there will be lots to talk about there as we share the new Turbonomic 6.4 release and also hear about the news and updates from VMware.

Real-time optimization for applications is now enhanced by fully feature-aware analytics from VMware vSAN including compression, deduplication, and the redundancy/resiliency settings.  This means that when decision are made by Turbonomic about where to place and how to scale VMs, containers, and applications, there is additional understanding of the actual capabilities and capacity of vSAN that are helping to drive the decision.

This also means that planning for growth includes the performance and capacity that is feature-aware.  When you run plans to model how a host replacement, or scenarios of how you may scale or migrate workloads, you are getting the actual infrastructure and application scale decisions based on the available performance/capacity plus full understanding of the raw storage and host configurations needed to deliver it.

Here is a quick highlight of the vSAN/HCI features in Turbonomic 6.4 (yes…that’s my crazy voice in there)

VMware Horizon VDI

Is it the year of VDI finally?! Based on how I’ve been seeing things in some super exciting customer deployments, yes it certainly is. One of the really cool examples is a company with their entire workforce on VDI…and it’s not a small company. The old school issue of managing “boot storms” is at a whole different level when you have worldwide employees across every time zone and all running on centralized Horizon infrastructure distributed across a few data centers for resiliency and latency reduction.

The use-case that Turbonomic is solving is that when users login and run, the actual consumption of resources is continuously analyzed for real-time, maximums, average, and historical patterns in order to decide how they should scale their VDI instance and where it should be placed based on the underlying infrastructure hosting the Horizon desktop pools.

Turbonomic will tell you where to place the user, how to size their desktop, and can even automate the changes in a service window and even tracks the user logout trigger so that Horizon admins can let their Horizon user entitlements be driven for better performance and efficiency by Turbonomic. That also extends into the scaling and growth planning which is done using the same analytics engine. Super cool!

Here’s a quick highlight reel of the feature:

Much more to come!

Here is a quick end-to-end list of the significant updates of the release which also includes a ton of really great updates for Microsoft Azure, the introduction of what are now rebranded as right-time actions, a big set of updates for Kubernetes, and much more!  Congratulations to the Turbonomic engineering team and a great release and let me know if you want any more details as I’m happy to jump in and help folks get to know more about the platform!

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