Deployment Options

Atlantis ILIO is deployed as a 1u physical server appliance, with a high availability (HA) option. The Atlantis ILIO appliance is installed inline in the data path between the VDI servers and the storage array. Typically, the Atlantis ILIO appliance(s) are installed at the top of each rack of VDI servers, supporting up to 1000 users per appliance. The Atlantis ILIO appliance scales out easily to add more desktop capacity by adding more VDI server racks without adding additional storage.

Out of the box, Atlantis ILIO’s VDI Storage Reduction and VDI Performance Acceleration features are activated and the VDI Image Management feature is disabled. To take advantage of Atlantis ILIO Image Management, an additional image management license key must be purchased.

For more information on VDI Image Management, visit the VDI Image Management solutions page.

Atlantis ILIO can be deployed in pairs as part of each VDI server rack for high availability. In a high availability configuration, the primary appliance handles all IO traffic while secondary appliance is available to take over VDI desktop requests upon failure of the primary appliance.

VDI and Storage Integration

Atlantis ILIO is completely transparent to the hypervisor and storage: the hypervisor sees ILIO as a storage volume and the SAN/NAS sees ILIO as a VDI server. Integrating Atlantis ILIO with VDI and storage for performance acceleration and storage reduction is as simple as:

  1. Racking and cabling the Atlantis ILIO appliance
  2. Powering on the ILIO appliance
  3. Configuring ILIO’s network and storage settings
  4. Exporting a data store to the VDI servers as NFS/iSCSI
  5. Copy, clone or migrate virtual machine images from old storage mount points to the ILIO data store

Taking advantage of Atlantis ILIO image management capabilities is as simple as (additional license required):

  1. Using the ILIO composer to create a set of layer-based virtual machine gold image components (operating system, security applications, IT installed productivity applications).
  2. Provisioning user desktops through ILIO provisioning tools including sysprep
  3. Assigning desktops to VDI pool using a connection broker. ILIO supports the creation of pools and user-assigned desktops that can be persistent or non-persistent.

For a list of VDI and Storage partners, visit the Partners Section of the website.