A resounding challenge in deploying virtual applications and infrastructure revolves around the data center layer. How do you allocate resources and centralize applications and management? Newer solutions, like converged infrastructure, allow administrators to aggregate servers, storage and networking components to more efficiently support virtual workloads.
CI appliances continue to improve when it comes to management, policy control and integration with virtual systems. Let’s examine three key benefits (and considerations) when deploying VDI on converged infrastructure.
Converged infrastructure aggregates resources. The integration of core infrastructure components can improve performance for users and also allow for better integration with virtual technologies. Instead of managing systems separately, you can point integrated blocks of compute, network and storage repositories to support critical virtual workloads like VDI. This simplifies management and supports more VDI use-cases.
Integrated management improves security and deployment. Hypervisor technologies can now directly integrate into CI solutions, merging on-premise technology and remote virtual instances. This means better security, more control over critical resources like network flow and fewer unknowns when deploying new systems. Most of all, this direct integration also speeds up VDI deployment and enables easier scaling between on-premise and cloud environments.
From a security perspective, you can control specific policies from the hypervisor layer when integrated with CI. For example, security or compliance policies specific to a given VM image may or may not travel with the image when migrated to different physical hosts. Risk controls must mitigate these and other concerns unique to the dynamic nature of virtualization and converged environments. By integrating hypervisor policies and management controls, you can adequately secure necessary workloads. Remember, CI combines the power of software and hardware. The unified management infrastructure behind CI allows you to centrally control where data lives and how it interacts with other CI resources.
VDI optimization. CI not only aggregates data center resources, it also intelligently optimizes them, such as by delivering graphics policies to users. The key difference here is the immediate delivery of other resources. Through CI, we’re integrating graphics alongside network and compute. Although we can still control optimization with standalone components, convergence can allow for even faster delivery.
Converged infrastructure introduces discrete data center benefits, such as reducing the data center footprint, improving scale-out economics and delivering better performance for users. As with any new technology, there is a learning curve. So while vendors stress the simplicity of CI, take the time to understand how this architecture must be deployed, managed and optimized differently.
Underwritten by HPE, NVIDIA and VMware
