VDI Sync (improved in Files 5.1)

If you’ve ever designed a multi-site VDI implementation you’ve likely faced the conundrum of how to handle user profiles for your users, or rather, how to avoid their wrath when something is out of sync when you make the fact they’re connecting to multiple resource locations transparent to them.

For years we’ve worked through the pro’s and con’s of whether to use DFS-R (and rely on manual intervention to stay within support), bvckup2, FSLogix Cloud Cache, PeerSoft, or Microsoft Failover Clustering or Scale-out File Server on top of Storage Spaces Direct. Each of these solutions have their own nuances that often left the VDI profile solution being the Achilles heel of the implementation.

Nutanix provided a technology known as Smart DR within Prism Central that let us fail over a whole share(s) between disparate Files Cluster implementations in the event of a disaster, or for disaster avoidance. This worked well, and much quicker than the traditional Files DR, but still took too long and users felt it. This was very much active/passive, increasing cross datacentre (or File Cluster) traffic and still left a fault domain very much weighted on one side or the other.

Nutanix then introduced VDI Sync in Nutanix Files 5.0 where a pair of Files clusters managed by the same Prism Central could be configured to sync in near real-time bi-directionally VDI profiles allowing for users to consume their profile from either cluster and have the changes sync bi-directionally.

This means that the traditional limitation of having Site A and Site B both consuming profiles from Site A until a failure occurred, become Site A for both desktop+profile and Site B for both desktop+profile to occur.

Manish Gupta – Software Staff Engineer at Nutanix wrote a great blog post explaining how this worked, and crucially included a diagram that makes it much easier to visualise. (Thanks Manish!)

Nutanix Files 5.0 with VDI Sync, whilst fantastic, did have an initial draw back though, it was only supported within the same Prism Central which was OK if you had both clusters managed by a third fault domain but was a bit of a problem if each site had its own Prism Central managing its own cluster(s).

Nutanix Files 5.1 in the release notes makes this subtle change in wording:

Files 5.0:

Files 5.1:

This is very very interesting, and is helping add another dimension to the age-old ‘how do I do profiles for multi-site?’ and whilst only being released very recently I have multiple customer designs planning on using it to simplify the topology whilst providing better isolation of fault domains.

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel.

Back To Top