There is a great post on the VMware End-User Computing Blog today regarding the usage of the new View 5.1 feature to enable Storage Acceleration with VMware View.

In the post, Fred Schimscheimer details some of Pivot 3′s read performance results using Content-Based Read Cache (CBRC) in of vSphere 5.0 with View 5.1. The end result is a significant drop in data storage IOP traffic due to it being offloaded to localized cache at the vSphere servers. The typical Boot storm no longer will thrash your storage devices.

Imagine this scenario. Traditionally, your 4 ESX server hosted 80 View Desktops. During a reboot of the infrastructure, each of those 320 desktops would need to read the same Windows desktop operating system from the array. This would place an incredible amount of stress on the storage array and the storage fabric resulting in lengthy boot times and performance impact to all the other systems sharing the same storage resource. With the View Storage Accelerator, the 2GB cache optimizes the block reads by caching the blocks as they are read and serving up local memory instances to other VM’s on the host. This in effect reduces the read volume from 80 VM’s to just the first VM to request each block. A considerable reduction in IOPS to the array.

If you or your organization has limited funds for storage acceleration and disk IO has been a bottleneck, be sure not to over look this critical enhancement to improving your virtual desktop performance.