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Enabling the next stage in VDI

Editorial Type: Technology Focus     Date: 05-2015    Views: 2611      





Flash is playing a key role in the development of desktop virtualisation, says Marcos Burnett, Sales Director for Northern Europe, SanDisk.

Desktop Virtualisation Infrastructure (VDI) is a way of accessing desktops running remotely in a data centre by using a protocol. There are many vendors in this space providing various solutions but two consistent factors when considering VDI solutions are network and storage. These two areas perfectly illustrate the evolution of VDI and show how flash plays an important role in VDI solutions, which is discussed in more detail below.

VDI EVOLUTION
The evolution of VDI can be categorised into three different phases:

VDI 1.0
This was an early stage and basic approach to VDI, which was not broadly adopted by enterprises. Companies were familiarising themselves with it as a solution and, as a result, kept VDI to non-critical applications. The adoption was mostly for call centre applications virtualising one application per desktop. At this stage, the footprint and configuration of the desktops were fairly small so running a few desktops (Virtual Machines) in a data centre did not consume many resources (computing, storage and network).

In these deployments, there were no huge storage IO, throughput or latency demands. HDD / spinning media storage was often good enough to serve the user need and experience. However, VDI 1.0 was the first attempt to apply breakthrough virtualisation technology to desktop computing, although the average desktop VM costs were similar to those of server workload VMs.

VDI 2.0
This is the current generation of VDI which started about two to three years ago and will likely continue for a few more; along the way becoming the baseline for next-generation VDI. The reason behind its prominence was the evaluation of VDI 1.0 by enterprises and the realisation of the benefits it offered around security, accessibility, flexibility and manageability compared to physical desktops. This led to the adoption of VDI becoming more mainstream, with organisations adopting more types of users alongside many applications. However, this created problems at the infrastructure layer, such as boot storm, desktop patching, fast deployment, and user experience.

From a storage perspective, these issues resulted in thousands of IOPS becoming a de-facto standard for these desktops and magnetic media was unable to cope with these new I/O demands. There were attempts to optimise storage performance by using a SAN consisting of 100s of magnetic media. But such solutions are neither cost-effective nor efficient as VDI demands different types of IO. There is an adoption of all-flash arrays in this space, which is quite successful, but cost is still a concern.

New architectures helped organisations to adopt hyper-converged solutions (bringing storage and compute together) where flash storage is a default element that enables to address the storage performance needs. Some solutions use flash for caching, while in other solutions the entire storage stack is designed using different types of flash storage based on the application need e.g. VMware All Flash Virtual SAN. Enterprises are now either adopting all flash and/or partial flash deployment using this hyper-converged approach.

To summarise, VDI 2.0 expanded the scope of desktop types, while delivering acceptable end user experience. Using innovative infrastructure approaches, enterprises have been able to keep the average cost per desktop lower than before.



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