VMware last week unveiled the VMware Express, a rolling demo platform largely dedicated to VMware View, their virtual desktop environment. Essentially a powerful data center-on-wheels, the truck will provide a demonstration environment at events across North America during its year-long tour.
Xsigo was selected to provide virtual I/O on the VMware Express for the obvious reason: virtual I/O significantly increases compute density. When space and power are at a premium, you need virtual I/O to make the most of them.
Jon Owings of Veristor captured in a recent blog post several points about why Xsigo virtual I/O and View are so complementary.
Starting with a VMware View reference architecture (shown below), he figured out how it would be implemented with traditional I/O. Jon comments, “It really struck me how many I/O connections (Network or Storage) it would take to run this POD. Minimum (in my opinion) would be 6 cables per host with ten 8 host clusters that is 480 cables!”
Next, he did the same math with Xsigo and arrived at 160 cables, a 66% reduction.

To further his point, he calculated the total server I/O bandwidth available with traditional I/O: 960Gbps was the total.
For Xsigo the total bandwidth came to 3,200 Gbps, over 3X more!
Jon surmises that a cost reduction would result from that reduced complexity (he’s right), and concludes, “Being in the data center I like any solution that makes provisioning servers easier, takes less cabling, and gives me unbelievable bandwidth. So just in the way VMware changed the way we think about the data center, virtual IO will once again change how we deal with our deployments.”
If you have chance to see the VMware Express as it tours the country, check it out. You’ll see not only the future of desktops, but of enterprise data centers as well.