Tintri

VM-aware File System

The Tintri VMstore file system is designed from the ground-up for VMs. It uses virtual machine abstractions — VMs and virtual disks — in place of conventional storage abstractions such as volumes, LUNs, or other legacy storage objects. All data management operations – snapshots, clones, and replication – are at VM level, so it is easy for both VM and storage admins to get immediate insight into the virtual environment.

Performance isolation and quality-of-service are at virtual disk and VM level. Tintri VMstore directly monitors and controls I/O performance for each virtual disk. Each I/O request – reads, writes, or metadata operations – maps directly to the particular virtual disk on which it occurs. Conventional storage must make file-level or volume-level decisions about data location and access prioritization, and then map these to the VM through bolt-on features — with their own complex set of storage abstractions — to give them context in a virtualized environment. By operating at the virtual machine and disk level, Tintri VMstore finally provides administrators with the same level of insight, control and automation as they have for compute, memory and networking resources.

Tintri VMstore is natively integrated with the VMware vCenter™ Server API to learn which virtual machines are active and reside on the datastore. The VMstore collects and reports per-VM and per-virtual disk statistics, such as size, I/O throughput, and resource utilization. An administrator can immediately see which virtual machines and virtual disks are responsible for the consumption of storage resources, and what performance the virtual machines receive.

Consistent Performance

Tintri VMstore is designed from the ground-up to support the requirements and access patterns of virtual machines. Conventional NFS servers handle a wide range of applications, file sizes, metadata operations, and stream-based reads and writes. They were never designed to isolate individual VMs. In contrast, Tintri VMstore creates a tight coupling between I/O activity and VM abstractions. Virtualization loads are mostly block-aligned read-and-write access to large files. The Tintri file system efficiently supports multi-gigabyte to multi-terabyte virtual disk files, efficiently handling many concurrent reads and writes.

Tintri VMstore also automates flash placement to isolate VM performance. Disk access latency and performance is magnified in a virtual environment and can become highly unpredictable. Flash performance, in contrast, is much easier to characterize, is location-independent, and minimizes interaction between request streams from different VMs. Virtual machines can be deployed on the Tintri VMstore without manual placement or guesswork. The Tintri file system automatically uses the combination of flash and disk that best suits the activity of the virtual machine, adjusting it over time to prevent variations in one VM’s I/O patterns from causing disruptions for other VMs.

The Tintri file system minimizes swaps to disk by using a very small block size with automated placement to ensure only active data is kept in flash. The typical mixture of hot-and-cold VM data in virtualized environments often include minimally-active or periodically busy VMs. The Tintri file system adapts to periodic workloads to ensure they are not evicted from flash during idle periods, and provides good read/write performance even for VMs that reside mainly on disk. Tintri eliminates traditional tiering by automating placement and writing directly to flash.

MLC FLASH

Tintri VMstore is designed to fully capitalize on the most cost-effective flash technology available. Multi-level cell (MLC) flash – combined with inline deduplication, compression, and a unique flash/disk file system – enables Tintri to cost-effectively run enterprise applications with flash-level performance.

Tintri’s innovative file system solves MLC flash problems that previously made it unsuitable for enterprise environments: MLC flash suffers from high levels of write amplification for random write workloads. Unchecked, this reduces random write throughput by more than 100 times, and dramatically reduces flash lifetime. The Tintri file system eliminates write amplification and delivers excellent system performance and longevity. MLC flash also produces periodic latency spikes due to internal metadata processes. This delays access for many hundreds of times longer than average. Tintri’s proprietary file system refinements eliminate these spikes.

The Tintri file system integrates flash as a first-class storage medium rather than as a bolt-on cache to fully leverage continued improvements in flash price and performance. Flash as an intelligent, highly granular resource — combined with inline dedupe and compression based file system architecture — radically alters the economics for VMs.

High Availability

The Tintri VMstore T540 dual-controller redundant architecture delivers the high availability and reliability that enterprise IT environments demand. It eliminates single points of failure in the VMstore system architecture, so VMs can operate from the VMstore without disruption. The underlying active-passive dual-controller architecture of the T540 provides two independent and fully redundant sets of computing resources for the Tintri file system. Any hardware failure, either external or internal, that may make one set of resources unavailable causes the other to take over.

Enterprise Operations

Tintri provides unique performance and capacity gauges to simplify decision-making and planning. Tintri VMstore lets administrators simply and accurately monitor performance utilization. For each VM, the Tintri file system monitors flash, disk and CPU usage over several days, and continuously calculates aggregate system impact. It evaluates factors like available flash capacity, disk I/O and the access patterns of virtual disks over time to ensure each VM gets the resources it needs to run near peak performance. Tintri’s unique approach allows VMstore to adapt to a range of different usage scenarios.

With a file system specifically designed for reliability and fast recovery, Tintri VMstore employs advanced transactional schemes to support non-disruptive software patches. Most patches apply in less than 30 seconds, with no disruption to VM clients or end-users.

Every VMstore appliance features sophisticated SSL-encrypted auto-support and one-button diagnostic data collection. Results are quickly and reliably sent via the cloud, enabling quick diagnosis and problem resolution without relying on e-mail and manual log file collection.

VMware VAAI Integration

Tintri NFS VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) plug-in is certified as VMware Ready and supports all of the array integration primitives. The VAAI plug-in provides seamless VM-level cloning capability directly from the familiar VMware tools such as vSphere client, vCloud Director, and Horizon View. Virtualization administrators can quickly and easily initiate native, space-efficient Tintri VMstore clones from VMware management tools. The VAAI clone process takes advantage of Tintri’s native cloning capabilities, so cloned VMs are completely space and performance efficient. The clones don’t consume any space until unique data is written to the system. Additionally, the Tintri patented use of flash assures that clones are 100% performance efficient. They get the same level of performance as any other VM stored on a Tintri VMstore system.

Tintri datastores are thin provisioned by default. VAAI gives users the option to select thick provisioning to reserve space when creating clones. Tintri’s NFS VAAI plug-in supports all three disk formats – thick provisioned eager zeroed, thick provisioned lazy zeroed, and thin provisioned (default).

The extended statistics primitive enables visibility into space usage on Tintri VMstore, especially for thin provisioned disks.