The storage layer is perhaps one of the most critical components in a VMware View design. For many VDI professionals, this is likely to be the major issue when called in for a performance troubleshooting exercise. Commonly, the storage layer is the root cause of the performance issue. Why is storage so critical? To answer this question, we first need to understand how Intel-based desktops work and interact with Windows operating systems before diving into the world of storage for VDI.

Physical desktops have always had dedicated hard disks to rely upon and only a single Windows kernel had access to the disk causing a single I/O stream. Despite being dedicated to the desktop, the Windows device also faced disk contention. This contention could have been generated due to an excessive amount of disk I/O operations or I/O block sizes. The important thing is that no matter what type of operation causes the contention, the end result is slow response time, also known...