Using Local Solid State Drives to provide VMware View Storage

While Implementing Vmware View on campus we're looking at what hardware and storage to use or purchase. In our current Vmware environment we have a mixture of technology due to migration from one to another.

• Server Hardware:  we currently have a mixture of Large Dell and IBM hosts and half a rack of Cisco UCS.  
• Storage Hardware: we have/had IBM sans, EMC sans, Equallogic, and now IBM N Series (read Netapp with out support).

Note: You would think the answer would be simple, just use the NetApp with the PAM cards it has but we've had very bad performance  and currently a 4 Month Support call with IBM with no solution in sight. So such we're not wanting to add to the IOPS load of the Netapp.

Our View Enviroment looks to be growing to the 1000 VM Range however these are non-persistent VM's that are refreshed on logoff for student use.

While researching Pivot3's vBank I started researching Solid-State Storage(SSD) for VMware figuring anyone trying to speed up the IOPS for Vmware View was just going to stick the Replica on a SSD anyway and ideally a SSD local to the VMware host. 

This lead me to reading Brian Madden's Post on the pretty much my same conclusion on View and SSD's. Anyway a commenter on his post, Lance Hundt, gave a link to VMware Reference Architecture for Stateless Desktops. Following that Document I found a more detailed really great Vmware PDF on how to actually do this with Local Solid State Drives. 

The VMware Reference Architecture for Stateless Virtual Desktops on Local Solid-State Storage with VMware View 4.5

Once you read this it because so clear, but the normal Vmware ESX mental rules get in the way. Normally Local  ESX storage is useless, we don't use it nor want it. This idea flips that on its head.

If you only had local really fast SSD's for storage everything would be really really fast. However the SSD's don't have much storage space because their two expensive. Not a problem however because the Stateless VM's are replica's and don't use much space. The idea seems sound to me but there is a added management cost when you take a host down and put it in maintenance mode, you first have to do some manual housekeeping.

I wish I provide more detail on this but I haven't been able to talked to anyone doing this yet but would be curious if any has. I'll update this post if I put together some SSD's to try it with and update this post if I do.