By: Courtney Burry, Director of PMM, EUC BU, VMware
Looking to make the move to desktop virtualization but worried that the business case won’t add up? VMware has just introduced a number of high-performance, fully validated desktop architectures that are simple to deploy, highly scalable, and extremely cost-effective. In fact some of these solutions are so cost-effective-they will allow you to fast track your stateless virtual desktop deployment for as little as $408 per user for datacenter hardware and software. And that’s LESS than the cost of a physical PC.*
How Do We Do It?
So how do you get there? Well-when you move to desktop virtualization there are many components to be considered. Not only do you need to evaluate desktop virtualization software, but you will also need to understand your user profiles and architect your storage, networking and servers to best support your end users and their requirements. And storage can often be a huge bottleneck-absorbing as much as 40-60% of the cost of any VDI rollout. In addition, “traditional” storage can be difficult to manage. This is why choosing the right storage and architecture is critical.
The good news is-there are many new high-capacity disks, hybrid arrays, and Flash-based storage technologies out there that help drive down costs while still ensuring high levels of throughput and lower latencies. VMware Horizon View additionally provides many storage optimizations including storage tiering, linked clones, vStorage Clone Array Integration and SE Sparse. When you pair VMware Horizon View with these storage offerings-you have an unbeatable combination. Click here for an overview of best practices and tips for storage considerations in your VDI environment.
New Validated Architectures
In order to provide you with quick and easy blueprints to get started, VMware has tested and validated a number of new architectures with storage vendors like Fusion io, Nimble, Virdent and Atlantis Computing. In addition we are working with Nutanix and Pivot3 to support customers with fully tested and validated storage and compute appliances that they can get up and running in under two hours. So whether you are rolling out 200 or 1000s of Horizon View seats, the vFast Track architectures ensure that the deployment will be cost-effective, will meet use requirements, and will scale linearly and predictably.
Find out more today by visiting: http://www.vmware.com/go/vfast-reference-architectures
Note: Costs include datacenter hardware and software (VMware Horizon View license). Per user costs do not include Windows Server OS (VM to host vCenter). It is assumed that a 2vCPU/4GB vRAM Windows Server OS (VM) is available to host View Connection Server and that Windows Infrastructure exists (Active Directory, etc.) and is not part of the equation. Windows Desktop OS licenses, thin client/PC hardware/peripherals are also not included as part of the per user costs.
