3PAR, the utility storage company, says it’s got an integrated virtual desktop provisioning and management solution for the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that will also scale VDI storage.

It’s supposed to automatically provision hundreds of high-performance virtual desktops that consume only a fraction of the bandwidth and storage capacity required with traditional storage, hence the name Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI.

3PAR CEO David Scott says, “Many of our customers already use 3PAR strategically for their VMware deployments to achieve greater I/O performance to disk, increased capacity utilization, and reliable and affordable instant point-in-time copies of their data. With 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI, organizations can now consider both server consolidation and centralized desktop management served from a single resilient utility storage platform.”

3PAR’s utility storage is supposed to enhance the implementation of VDI on a traditional SAN by providing additional performance, simplified provisioning and rapid recovery while reducing required capacity.

The widgetry builds on 3PAR Virtual Copy, the company’s snapshot software, to create a utility computing infrastructure that’s supposed to maximize the benefit of centralized desktop management.

3PAR says the Thin Copy Desktop offers high-performance desktop booting, automated provisioning, and rapid desktop recovery while consuming 90% less capacity for desktop images.

Concurrent with the announcement, 3PAR upgraded the 3PAR Virtual Copy to support up to 128 read/writable snapshots per base volume and promote a child Virtual Copy snapshot to any of its read/writable parent snapshots. Up to 500 read-only snapshots per base volume is supported with these enhancements.

3PAR Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI is supposed to create a maximum 128 virtual desktops from a single “golden desktop” image using little additional storage or bandwidth.

Even when simultaneously booted, 3PAR says these virtual desktops consume only minimal additional bandwidth and storage resources than the golden image used to create them.  

Once created the desktop snapshots are exported to the VMware ESX hypervisor, which creates a virtual desktop from each snapshot. There is no manual provisioning or host-based cloning.

3PAR says booting hundreds of desktops from a single VMware ESX cluster can be faster than for an individual desktop and is particularly useful after a power outage when a large number of desktops are booting simultaneously.

3PAR Virtual Copy snapshots can share the same cache pages for common data in a snapshot tree.

The company says when booting most data is common among the virtual desktop boot images, requiring only a single copy in cache to potentially support hundreds of booting clients. It’s supposed to eliminate the performance impact common to traditional SAN and NAS devices that typically page to disk for each booting client.

One-to-one relationships are maintained between the virtual desktop and the underlying snapshots to give administrators precise insight into I/O and capacity utilization for each virtual desktop.