An administrator is monitoring cluster I/O and Latency during VDI user logins shortly after 9:00am.

The charts provided display a scenario typical of a VDI Boot Storm or login storm, characterized by a massive spike in Read IOPS (top chart) while maintaining extremely low Read I/O Latency (bottom chart).

This behavior is best described by Data Locality (specifically leveraged through a mechanism often called Shadow Clones in VDI contexts).

The Scenario: During VDI logins, hundreds or thousands of VMs simultaneously read from the same base "Golden Image" or replica disk.

The Mechanism: Nutanix Data Locality ensures that VM data is served locally from the node where the VM is running. In the specific case of multi-reader VDI workloads, the Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric detects that the same vDisk is being read by VMs across multiple nodes. It automatically caches this vDisk (Shadow Clone) on the local SSD/RAM of every node.

The Result: As shown in the graphs, the cluster delivers very high Read IOPS because every node is serving its own VMs from local cache, preventing network congestion. Consequently, the latency remains flat and near-zero, rather than spiking as it would in a traditional centralized storage architecture where all reads traverse the network to a single controller.