Virsto has had some very cool ways to cut down on VM storage bloat for Microsoft Hyper-V hosts for more than a year. This week they announced they are moving into the VMware world and have redesigned their product for vSphere v4.1 hypervisors and looking specifically at improving the storage performance for VDI installations in particular. The gains are big: you can cut your storage costs per virtual desktop in half in typical circumstances.
The idea is to provide instant cloning of desktop images with greater virtual desktop density and higher performance storage I/O. VDI creates all sorts of storage bloat storing all those desktop images, and they have applied their technology to make a better thin provisioning mousetrap. They install directly into the hypervisor and are managed from the native hypervisor tools from either Microsoft or now, VMware’s vCenter.
The software will work with VMware View v4 and Xen Desktop v5. Pricing starts at $2800 per host, and beta will be available next week.
