Blog by PQR

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, or VDI, is hot. It’s cool, secure, centrally managed, flexible - it’s an IT manager’s dream.

VDI comes in two flavours; Service Hosted VDI (Centralized, single-user remote vDesktop solution) and Client-Side VDI (local, single-user vDesktop solution).

The advantages of a VDI infrastructure are that virtual desktops are hardware independent and can be accessed from any common OS. It is also much easier to deploy virtual desktops and to facilitate the freedom that the users require of them. And because of the single-user OS, application compatibility is much less of an issue than it is with terminal servers.

However, when implementing a VDI infrastructure certain points need to be addressed. First of all, the TCO/ROI calculation may not be as rosy as some people suggest. Secondly, the performance impact on applications, specifically multimedia and 3D applications, needs to be investigated. And finally, don’t forget to check licensing aspects, as this can be a very significant factor in VDI infrastructure.

While centralized desktop computing provides important advantages, all resources come together in the datacentre. That means that the CPU resources, memory resources, networking and disk resources all need to be facilitated from a single point - the virtual infrastructure.

The advantage of a central infrastructure is that, when sized properly, it is more flexible in terms of resource consumption than decentralized computing. It is also more capable of handling a certain amount of peak loads, as these only occur once in a while on a small number of systems in an average datacentre.

But what if the peak loads are sustained and the averages are so high that the cost of facilitating them is disproportionate to that of decentralized computing?

As it turns out, there is a hidden danger to VDI. There’s a killer named “IOPS”. 

Read the whole story in my whitepaper:  http://virtuall.eu/download-document/vdi-storage-deep-impact