What Is The Right HCI Solution For Your VDI

So you might be building a new environment or you might be doing a hardware refresh for your VDI. If this is the case you have three options one being Traditional Infrastructure, Converged Infrastructure, or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). In this post i am going to focus on HCI and why it is such a great option for VDI.

What is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI):

HCI is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that is comprised of the following building blocks compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor. HCI Systems are managed as a single system using a common tool set.

Advantages of Hyper-Converged Infrastructures:

Simplified management: a HCI helps unifies management into a single interface. This  can allow the rest of your IT team to focus on proactive parts of the business.

Reduced costs and increased efficiency: With HCI lower costs of purchasing and management can be achieved for VDI.

Increased agility and faster deployment: HCI allows for much faster deployment of new infrastructure.

Best Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for VMware Horizon View:

When it comes to the best HCI solution for VMware Horizon View I believe that a solution based on VMware's vSAN stands at the top. One of the main reasons why i pick this as my top choice for VMware Horizon view would be due to the fact that vSAN comes with both Horizon Advanced and Enterprise licencing. This helps as you do not have to pay for it to be part of the solution.  This also allows you to keep all the management of your Horizon View solution with one vendor.  This solution will also help lower the over all cost of your Horizon View solution.

Best Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop:

When it comes to the best HCI solution for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop I believe that a solution based on Nutanix makes a really good top choice. Most people I know use a VMware Hypervisor to run Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop workloads on. With Nutanix you can use Acropolis Hypervisor to run your Citrix VDI and dont have to use VMware. The great thing about this is you can also still use PVS or MCS with Nutanix. 

Conclusion:

So as you can see there are some benefits to use HCI when designing a VDI environment. I have selected a few HCI solutions here that I think best fit  both VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenApp / XenDesktop. There are other options so don't take this as the only HCI solutions, but I hope that when you take a look at VDI hardware solutions that you take a good look at HCI.