in this episode of the az140 study guide
we're going to focus in on
planning your fs logix storage and there
is a lot of stuff to get into
so let's get started
[Applause]
i'm dean safola and this is the azure
academy fslogix is a set of solutions
that has
four components user and office profiles
application masking and java version
control
and we're going to dig into these all in
a future episode so
be sure that your notification bell is
clicked on and that you've subscribed so
you know when those all come out
but in this episode since we're focusing
in on getting the right
storage for fslogix we only need to talk
about our profiles
and just like when you're planning for
your applications we need to start with
the requirements
for fslogix the first one is simple and
that's capacity
how much storage do you need for your
profiles and you know as well as i do
that profiles will only
grow over time so we need to think about
that as well
now if you have an existing vdi
environment of some kind
then you need to look at your average
user for how large their profile is as a
good place to start if you don't have an
existing environment yet then you just
really need to take a yes and
don't worry that's not near as bad as it
sounds which i'll explain in just a
minute or you can just set up a
quick test environment have users log in
set up everything the way that you think
you want it
and then just take the average in my
environment
after i've already set up everything and
people have been well
using it i end up with about four
gigabytes as my average profile
size so some simple math says that i
have 4 gigabytes per user
on average and i've got 4 000 users
now that means i need 4 times 1 000 or
4 terabytes worth of disk space in my
storage for my profiles
but wait there's more each profile will
be stored as a virtual hard drive
file and there are two best practices
that you should remember
the first is that you can choose to
store your profiles as
vhdx files and when you do that lets you
use the second best practice and that is
dynamic disks
and implementing both of these will help
you to manage your growth of your
profiles over time
it lets windows think that there's as
much space as windows thinks it needs
and then your actual size on disk is
going to be smaller
but it will be allowed to grow which
means you don't have to babysit it and
remember this is the average
user you will of course have users who
use far less
and some who use far more and as far as
those big ones
go it's really not as bad as it sounds
because now you just need to do
maintenance on
two or three users rather than the
entire fleet
now i did say earlier that it was okay
to guess
on your profile size if you don't have
an existing environment or
test environment and that's really okay
because we are in the cloud and honestly
even if you had an example user you
probably aren't
going to be 100 accurate and there are a
few reasons why
and the first we already mentioned
profiles grow over time
it's going to change anyway and you're
going to have to adjust for that
the second is it's the cloud you can
always increase or decrease the size of
your file share with the click of a
button so it's not really a big deal
and changing the size of that share will
also
increase or decrease your cost as well
so keep that in mind
and there's one other thing to think
about and that is the management of your
profile storage
what i want you to think about here is
how we can separate our fslogix profiles
into different kinds of workloads so the
best practice here is to align your
profile
share with your host pools now this is
just like what we talked about in
episode three
your host pools are a collection of
identical virtual machines
that are all doing the same job and that
means that your user profiles are also
based on a specific type of workload and
configuration
so it makes sense to have one share for
one host pool now there are some other
things in your fslogix configurations
that
may make you want to have more than one
share per host pool
we're going to deal with that in our
next episode when we plan
on our user profiles configurations in
fs logics
so be sure that you've rung the
notification bell so you don't miss that
now let's talk about the other side of
our requirements and that is performance
we want our users to have as great an
experience as we can provide
without breaking the bank and spinning
up bigger and faster storage than what
they can really use
and since i don't know exactly what you
and your users are going to be doing in
your environment
let's use some good solid average
numbers
to tell us the kind of performance that
we need when you have a user log on
their profile gets mounted onto the
virtual machine
and then that will consume 50 iops
per user and then after everything
settles down
in the log on process they will average
around 10
iops per user now some of you might be
thinking
1.21 shakes
[Music]
so iops stands for input output
operations
per second it's a good common way to
measure storage
performance and of course there is more
to performance than just
raw iops and you can certainly go down
that path if you need to
but for today let's just use that as a
good standard
and it's time to break out your slide
rules because we're going to get your
math hat
on and take a quiz let's go back to that
example of 4
000 users that i mentioned earlier so we
need about
4 terabytes of storage and that's to
cover our 4 000 users
each user will consume on average 50
iops during the login logout process
and 10 iops in the steady state
so how many collective iops do we need
to support
4 000 users so please put your answers
in the comment section down below so i
can see how you're doing
next question our 4000 users will be
divided across our
three host pools the first is a personal
pool with 500 users
the second is a non-persistent pool of
2500 users and the last is a remote app
only
pool of 1000 users and the question is
what are the login and steady state iops
for each of the pools
so now that you have the answer to
questions one and two double check them
against each other and be sure that they
agree because
question three is going to layer on
another requirement
now we know that we need enough storage
space for
all of that data and we know we need
around 50 iops per user
at maximum for login log off but the
question here is
how many users in each pool will be
logging in
at the same time see our company here is
a
large global company that has a follow
the sun
model each one of these pools needs one
third of the total number of users to be
logged in
at any one time so assuming that they
all log in at once
how many iops do we need for each pool
to support that number of users
all right so now that you've put your
answers in the comments down below
and we know how much capacity we need we
know how much performance we need
the question now is where should we put
our profiles
now there are several links in the video
description below in the resources
section as usual
and this first link goes over to the wvd
docs
showing this table with the three
supported storage
platforms for fslogix and wvd and that
is
azure files azure netapp files
and a windows server with storage spaces
direct and each one of them does have
their own benefits
the one thing to keep in mind no matter
which storage solution you
pick is that location matters
just like we talked about in episode 5
about our network planning you should
keep your fslogix storage
as close to your session host as
possible
which will keep latency as low as
possible
and in azure speak that means the
particular region
so if your host pools and your vms are
in the east us region
your storage should be there too so
which one of these storage platforms is
right for you
well let's understand some few things
about them storage spaces direct is a
self-managed storage solution built on
top of a windows file server cluster
and it needs a minimum of two azure
virtual machines
they will also need to have multiple
high performance disks
and you will need azure blob storage as
a cloud witness
now managing your own server for this
kind of thing means that you will have
more control over the vm
size disk configuration the cost the
security
however it's not as scalable as the
other solutions
and troubleshooting is all on you so if
you've never managed a storage spaces
direct cluster before
i would not suggest that you start now
especially because you can get much more
scale with less management out of the
other
cloud platform services so let's talk
about azure netapp files
now i know that there are some customers
that approach the cloud with the
one throat to choke philosophy which
basically means that you want to only
deal with one vendor
so that if you have any problems you
know exactly who to go to
and with that in mind some of you may
not even consider
using azure netapp files because you
think that it's well
netapp so it's another company and i
don't want to deal with that
so let me set the record straight azure
netapp files is a
true first party service in azure just
like azure files or windows virtual
desktop
it is netapp storage technology that is
operated
and supported by internal microsoft
personnel who are netapp experts
this is not a netapp direct offering or
solution this is all 100
azure now with that out of the way azure
netapp files is the highest
performing solution in the cloud today
for your storage
you can have 12.5 petabytes of storage
with speeds up to 400 000 iops out of a
single appliance
now with all that performance does come
cost so let's break this down a little
more
there are three tiers of netapp
performance that you can get each one
has their own layer of cost and
performance
but something to keep in mind if you are
using azure netapp files
only for wvd and you have less than
six or seven thousand users you probably
want to think twice
and that's because the price per user
versus the cost of the solution
however if you have other file services
workloads either smb
or nfs especially any other enterprise
class
file workloads then that along with wvd
could be a great choice for you
you could put all of those multiple
solutions under a single storage
platform which of course means easier
management
but life is full of trade-offs and
there's some things you need to know to
balance out your decision
and the first is backups now netapp
today
supports taking snapshots inside the
appliance
and that does mean that if something
somehow went wrong with your netapp
instance
then you might not only lose your data
but you may lose your backup data as
well
so you can protect your data in another
way in netapp
and you could do that with a feature
called cross region replication
this would require two netapp instances
in two different azure regions
and it protects the data by replicating
your volumes from the one to the other
and not only can this function as a
backup solution but it's also a great dr
solution another thing to consider are
the number of connections
a single netapp appliance can support up
to 1 000 virtual machines connecting to
it today
so you need to consider how many total
hosts that you have that are
communicating with this netapp appliance
and that's across all of your workloads
put together so if you do the math
are you over 1000 vms if so you need
more than one netapp instance so the
last thing to think about in your azure
netapp files
is performance the maximum iops of one
netapp instance can be four hundred
thousand
iops and remember if you have your fs
logic shares divided by host pools which
is a best practice
and you have three host pools you need
three shares
so the four hundred thousand iops refers
to the collective
performance across all the shares on
that one appliance
if you need more than four hundred
thousand iops you need
another netapp instance so the third
solution here
of course is azure files now azure files
is built on top of
azure storage accounts and there are two
performance tiers
standard and premium both of which can
support up to
100 terabytes of data per share now the
standard shares by default can have
1 000 iops per share but there's a flag
that you can flip that's called
large file shares which will make
standard go up to
10 000 iops premium can go up to 100 000
iops
premium also has a benefit that's called
smb multi-channel where you can
increase the number of network
connections from your vms to the share
and you can get more performance that
way as for backups we've got a few
options you can take snapshots right
inside the storage account kind of like
with netapp but you also have the option
of using
azure backup which not only will manage
those
shares for backups and restores but the
data is also
stored in an azure backup vault which is
separate storage than the storage
account
so if the storage account is lost for
some reason the data is still in backup
and can be recovered
so you've got a lot to think about in
planning your fs logic storage and don't
forget to put all your answers to the
quiz
in the comments section before you go
peeking at somebody else's answers
and the only other thing to think about
is what you're going to watch next are
you going to watch the latest video up
here on the azure academy
or are you going to go to the next video
in the az140 study guide
series that's where we're going to talk
about our fslogix configurations
so thanks for joining me today hope this
was a help to you click that like button
and share this video with others and
i'll see you in the next episode
happy learning