With all the craziness circling Coronavirus, I am starting to see more and more companies encourage their employees to work from home. This means employees who work remotely will need to connect to business resources through IT-managed devices, which either organizations supply or, increasingly, employees provide in a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model. While this trend gives employees flexibility, the challenge falls to IT staff to provide employees with the same quality support and secure access to documents and applications they’d get in a centrally located workplace.
As a way of addressing these trends and challenges, IT admins are turning to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), also known as desktop virtualization, to transform to a modern workplace. Estimated to reach $26B by 2025, the global VDI market expands as organizations seek:
- Money and time savings
- Increased security measures to protect against data theft and malware attacks on personal devices
- Easier management through remote administration and troubleshooting of IT infrastructure and devices.
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) builds upon these savings and efficiencies by offering agility, scalability and simplicity that organizations need to implement VDI solutions that support these BYOD models.
Designed exclusively by Dell EMC and VMware, VxRail is the easiest and fastest way to implement a high-performance VDI solution. VxRail is the easiest path for IT to provide a seamless Work From Home experience for their employees. Here are the top 5 reasons why customers are using VxRail as their foundation for VDI:
1) Save admin time with easier deployment, configuration and management
VxRail simply incorporates compute, storage, virtualization and management in one place. This removes complexities to speed up new VDI solution implementation compared to traditional siloed IT infrastructure. Because VxRail infrastructure offers simplified remote management options and can be deployed to fit within a small footprint, organizations can reduce onsite IT staff by managing VDI clients remotely, making VxRail ideal for VDI at the edge and in remote or branch offices. For ease of management, VxRail HCI System Software automates lifecycle management, reduces complexity and boosts infrastructure security. Admins can perform updates and patch production environments with no downtime while VxRail Manager intelligently deploys important updates.
2) Scale infrastructure easily as business grows
Business growth brings new challenges. However, scaling your infrastructure to meet these demands shouldn’t be as hard as it is these days. Depending on the applications you run and the number of VDI instances that admins must deploy on the fly, your solution can quickly saturate compute or I/O. VxRail allows organizations to scale both compute and storage quickly, so you can start small at little expense and grow as needs change. VxRail scales up to 64 nodes per cluster, supporting thousands of virtual desktops. Plus, all of the HCI management software (VxRail Manager) is built into vCenter to provide an easy-to-navigate, heavily automated path to fast scaling, so admins can add nodes on demand.
3) Improve performance and security
VDI is an IO-intensive workload with extreme burst conditions at times when users log on and off. This taxes a shared storage pool and degrades user experience unacceptably. VxRail offers all flash storage options to handle these peak performance requirements and eliminate IO bottlenecks.
VxRail also supports the latest Intel Optane SSD NVMe caching drives that provide low latency and high performance to further alleviate these bottlenecks. This covers organizations whose users deal with graphics-intensive workloads, offering purpose-built GPU hardware to meet these needs. For scaling high-performance virtual graphics and compute, the NVIDIA GPU supports 2x graphics acceleration performance and 50 percent more users per board than the previous-generation GPU.
VxRail Analytical Consulting Engine (ACE) leverages artificial intelligence and infrastructure machine learning to drive increased operation efficiencies through automation. ACE ensures healthy utilization rates and even forecasts resource consumption to keep your HCI stack operating at peak performance.
VxRail also offers the latest in security to ensure that your high-performing workloads keep running. Through highly redundant architecture, integrated Dell EMC data protection software and non-disruptive upgrades, organizations can remain confident that users’ desktops will always be available—even during boot storms and patch updates. Additional comprehensive data protection options, including RecoverPoint for VMs, ensures quick operational recovery from disaster.
4) A seamless experience thanks to joint engineering between Dell EMC and VMware
Dell EMC and VMware teamed up to create VxRail, the only fully integrated, preconfigured and tested HCI appliance powered by VMware vSAN. The fully loaded, secure VxRail HCI with full stack integration creates the most automated VMware experience for desktop virtualization. IT administrators benefit from the simplicity of streamlined management of both hardware and software layers, which means they spend less time coordinating maintenance and updates through disparate vendors and have more time to ensure employees’ VDI sessions are running smoothly across the sea of BYOD devices. For organizations implementing VDI via hybrid cloud, VxRail offers VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail as the platform for Dell Technologies Cloud, allowing workload deployment automation of VMware Horizon VDI environments for a true turnkey experience that integrates the HCI infrastructure layer and cloud software stack in one.
VxRail offers a single point of global 24×7 support for both hardware and software, reducing administrator hassles and making challenges easier to manage in cases where onsite staff is limited.
5) Save on total cost of ownership for VDI
Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure enables organizations to reduce their VDI footprint and the associated capital outlay for initial hardware purchase. The consolidated VxRail infrastructure also shrinks ongoing operating costs by reducing administrator burdens through simplifying infrastructure, lowering energy consumption and reducing physical space and cabling. VxRail Manager’s automation of routine management tasks gives administrators time back, which allows them to dedicate resources to the adoption of emerging technologies rather than spending their time on routine tasks. A recent IDC study showed adopting the Dell EMC VxRail improved IT team efficiency by as much as 60 percent and delivered a 489 percent five-year return on investment.
Dell EMC VxRail simplifies infrastructure, eases scalability and offers high performing virtual desktop infrastructure solutions. It is the easiest way for IT to provide a turn-key Work From Home solution for their employees.
