SSD is a subject of interest in today's and upcoming storage systems. The same goes for the no. of IOPS required for VDI solutions. This article discusses combining the both.

In a previous article I’ve described how to add SSD storage to your ESX server. I’ve also written an article about creating linked clones with the Virtulization Ecoshell. Now I’m going to combine those two techniques and use VMware’s Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Simulator (RAWC is available for VMware Partners only) to generate some real load in the Windows XP virtual machines.

Desktop RAWC runs on a Windows XP guest operating system (memory 1 GB) and is executed on each desktop virtual machine (VM). Each target desktop VM is equipped to run a RAWC workload that simulates typical user behaviour, running an application set commonly used across a broad array of desktop environments. The workload has a set of randomly executed functions that perform operations on a variety of applications.

I’ve created 20 linked clones which are all stored on the Intel X25-M Postville SSD 80GB drive. During the execution of the workload, multiple applications are opened at the same time and windows are minimized and maximized as the workload progresses, randomly switching between each application.

Source and more: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1413-Hosting-20-linked-clones-on-SSD-storage.html