Three times faster and 15.7% less expensive!
By Cyndie Zikmund, End-User Computing Product Line Marketing Manager, VMware
Architecting a VDI environment for high availability and optimum load balancing became easier this year when VMware and F5 announced their joint solution that included VMware Horizon with F5 BIG-IP. The expectation was that the two leaders in their respective markets would combine forces to provide a secure, scalable, and powerful platform for today’s mobile workforce, while realizing low costs and easy deployments.
Today, we are delighted to announce that in an independent lab test and report published by Principled Technologies, the operational and capital expense savings with VMware Horizon and F5 BIG-IP are real:
We found that BIG-IP was considerably easier and three times faster to integrate with an existing Horizon VDI environment than Citrix NetScaler with its respective VDI environment, Citrix XenDesktop. In addition, the VMware-F5 solution was up to 15.7 percent less expensive than the Citrix solution. Together, these findings make VMware Horizon and F5 BIG-IP an attractive choice compared to alternatives on the market.
—Principled Technologies
Because VDI is a key initiative for many organizations moving toward cloud-based end-user computing in the post-PC era, choosing the right virtualization platform is both challenging and critical to the success of this transformation. Careful consideration is given to the underlying virtualization platform as well as to the supporting infrastructure—and that includes network considerations.
VDI deployments benefit from having more than one connection server to provide high availability. Many organizations use Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) to help balance the load across the multiple connection servers in their environment. ADCs also provide a number of other capabilities such as access control, SSO, and protocol proxy.
Combining the two capabilities into a powerful and cost-effective solution is already benefiting customers:
VMware Horizon View™ and F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager have been a natural fit in supporting our VDI infrastructure, maximizing application uptime and performance for our clinicians. The companies’ solutions and prescriptive guidance optimize and extend functionality, simplify deployments, and lower TCO.
—Sean Graham, network architect, Kettering Health Network
Find out more in this VMware Horizon and F5 BIG-IP reference architecture.
