Since this will officially be my first blog post as a Citrix CTP, I would like to start by thanking everybody for your support during the last couple of years and of course for all the congratulations and well wishes I have received since the official announcement last week. It has been a truly wonderful experience! Having said that, let’s get back on topic. This is not going to be a MCS vs. PVS kind of blog post; there are plenty of good ones out there already, instead I will assume that you already choose MCS over PVS. However, while the choice has been made you still have some doubts as to weather MCS is up to the task at hand. Throughout this post I will summarize some things to think about and questions to ask when and before implementing Citrix MCS.
Block vs file level storage, VMware VMFS, NTFS and some of the protocols involved.
During the past few months I have spend a considerable amount of time looking at various storage related topics. Among others I discussed Web Scale technology as part of converged and software defined architectures, with Nutanix being one of the main vendors, next I also took a, somewhat, deeper dive into the wondrous world of IOPS where I talked about some of their characteristics and ways to potentially enhance performance and the end user experience, which are still two of the main concerns when dealing with these bad boys. Throughout this article I want to take a closer look at some of the differences between block vs file level storage, the accompanying file systems, the different protocols used, potential block sizes and some of the characteristics of VMware VMFS in particular.