Test out PernixData FVP with an interactive demo

Want to get a feel for how PernixData FVP works, before testing it out inside your own environment? Now you can, using an interactive demo.

Head over to http://www.pernixdata.com/fvp-interactive-demo and click the button to generate a login.

Once you log in, you’ll see that you have actually been logged into the vSphere Web Client! You will be shown a list of FVP clusters – one interesting thing to note straight away is that you can create multiple FVP clusters on top of one vCenter cluster, using different acceleration resources. Here we have DFTM-Z (which uses RAM) as well as both PCIe & SSD flash.

DFTM-Z is a relatively new feature, included in FVP 2.5 – it adds adaptive memory compression to DFTM (which stands for Distributed Fault-Tolerant Memory) allowing you to get more out of the RAM being used for acceleration. It is automatically enabled when more than 20Gb is allocated to the FVP cluster, and scales as capacity increases. Only colder data is compressed, so active writes are not affected. As shown in the screenshot it can make a real difference to the capacity of your DFTM cluster!

Click on a cluster name to drill into it – you can then click through the Summary, Monitor, and Manage tabs to see what’s going on with the cluster. The Summary tab gives a handy view of the configuration, as well as both realtime and historical stats. The realtime stats can also be retrieved using Powershell using the Get-PrnxObjectStats cmdlet?—?for example, at Cloudhelix we periodically poll the FVP management server for these stats and display them on the support team’s internal portal that also includes things like monitoring stats, open tickets, and so on.

The Monitor tab has the all-important performance graphs that let you demonstrate at a glance the performance improvement FVP brings to your environment. If you hover over a point on the graph you can see more information about that particular point in time.

You can drill into an individual VM to see its stats as well.

The Manage tab is where you can make changes to the configuration. With a DFTM cluster you can change the amount of RAM that a host is contributing to the cluster in 4Gb increments – very handy to have such a fine level of control. This is also something that can be tweaked using Powershell with the Set-PrnxHostRAM cmdlet!

You can also configure which VMs are being accelerated by FVP. Here, individual VMs are being accelerated – you can also choose to apply the acceleration policy at the datastore level. This means that any new VMs will be accelerated automatically, something that is very important to us as a service provider – it means that if a cloud customer logs in via the vCloud Director interface and creates a VM, it will be automatically accelerated without any manual intervention.

By now, you should have a good idea of how FVP works – the next step is to set it up on your own infrastructure! If your thinking of migrating to the cloud contact us here and an expert will get back to you shortly.