Infinio Accelerator 2.0 Released today. What is Infinio? It's an unique caching solution that only needs some RAM from your hosts to create shared deduplicated caching pool which will accelerate your VMware vSphere environment.
With such a cache in place, the storage requests does not need to go all the way down to your NAS, but it’s the cache which serves the requests (and is in between the ESXi host and the storage system), not the back end NAS device. And all the cache sits in the RAM – the fastest medium!
As a results the offloaded requests are served much faster from RAM than would have been from the storage device which is laying further down the whole storage stack.
Easy Setup!
The setup is very easy and non disruptive as you don't have to reboot your ESXi hosts, vCenter or storage system. Infinio has 30 days trial where you can test the full product during that period. As you'll see during the setup I've done, only single IP address is needed so you don't have to worry about reserving the other IP addresses for the accelerator's VMs as this process works out of the box behind the scenes. No storage-side changes do not has to be made as well, the solution is completely non-disruptive.
I have had an occasion to try the pre-release version in my lab. It's a semi automated process where the product first gathers the necessary network information and you also create login, password in order to be able to connect to the management appliance.
Step 1
Step 2 – your're asked about your vCenter credentials.
Step 3 – Choose where which host, which datastore, and which network you want to use for Infinio management VM to be used. Infinio validates your environment for available resources. You'll need 8Gb from each host…
Step 4 – Network settings. You can go with DHCP or chose static IP. No suprises…
Step 5 – The product invites you if you would like to reduce the retention policy of vCenter server database or not.
Step 6 – Ready to go…
Step 7 – Then you can see the progress of the setup through the same screen…
The second part of the setup is where you basically login to your Infinio console and select which datastore you want to start accelerate.
After a while you'll find that your VMs instead of requesting the bits from the back end storage, they do request the bits from the cache…
I have done a video which has a detailed setup and config. You can watch it bellow…
What’s New in Infinio v2.0?
SAN and Unified Storage support: In addition to support for the NFS storage protocol, v2.0 include full support for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FCoE, and environments with multiple protocols. No matter which storage protocol customers choose, the Infinio user experience remains the same, including wizard-driven installation, zero operational impact, and instant access to advanced reporting.
Application-level reporting: Infinio v2.0 adds the ability to start with a weekly datastore performance view and drill all the way down to a minute-by-minute per-application view of storage performance. Users can easily identify peak latency spikes, and then explore them at a level of detail that allows them to determine which workloads are responsible for increasing the load on storage, and which workloads are best suited for Infinio caching.
More enhancements to the UI were done as well:
Quote:
It's been long time since I haven't installed product that was such an easy install and use. Kudos to Infinio! Well done. To uninstall the accelerator is also easy, and no further reconfiguration to the previous state is necessary. When you chose uninstall the product it unistalls just as clean as it installs. I think that this should be pointed out as well. Check it out.
Source: Infinio Blog
Is it still Read-only caching or Read-Write caching?