Hyperconverged Infrastructure vSAN vSAN

Announcing Intel Select Solution for VMware Horizon VDI on vSAN

VMware is excited to announce a new solution from Intel that brings together VMware’s superior software and Intel’s cutting-edge technology through the Intel Select Solutions Brand. Intel Select Solutions for VMware Horizon VDI on vSAN can help simplify your VDI deployment while employing a best-in-class hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) experience. In today’s environment, the sudden increase in remote workers has highlighted the need for scalable and flexible infrastructure that allows for a seamless experience for employees. Many organizations are discovering that the increase in remote workers can tax legacy systems that support VDI, resulting in slow performance and frustrated users. Intel Select Solutions for VMware Horizon VDI on vSAN offer a faster, simpler path to a HCI optimized for VDI, while helping to ensure outstanding performance and strong security for remote workers. The solutions feature VMware Horizon 7 and VMware vSAN 6.7+ running on servers powered by 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® Optane™ technology, Intel solid state drives (SSDs) with NVM Express (NVMe), and high-speed Intel Ethernet Adapters.

Increase Consolidation While Lowering Cost Per User

Intel Select Solutions for VMware Horizon VDI on vSAN can help simplify your VDI deployment. The configurations are performance-optimized specifically for VMware Horizon software running on VMware vSAN, so you can reduce the time required to evaluate, select, and purchase the necessary hardware components.

The solution allows you to support 20% more VDI users per dollar. Compared to a baseline of 384GB DDR DRAM only that supported 160 users, adding Intel Optane PMem increased the number of Horizon desktop users by 87%, to 300 users, while lowering the TCO $/ VDI user by over 16%1.

As preconfigured, tested, and verified solutions, they also help minimize the time required to evaluate and deploy new virtual desktops or to scale your existing environment with an excellent price/performance balance.

VMware Horizon VDI on vSAN is an Award-Winning VDI Solution

As organizations are mandated to drastically increase the number of employees that work from home, they have turned to VMware Horizon because it is a secure and manageable way to deliver corporate resources to end users. Recognized as an industry leader for the 5th year in a row, Horizon delivers virtualized desktops and applications through a single platform, allowing organizations to keep corporate data and applications in the datacenter and off endpoints. Horizon’s Just-in-time Management Platform, or JMP technology, allows IT admins to create brand new desktops which can be destroyed again at logoff, enhancing the security posture of the organization. When users log on, these non-persistent virtual desktops are personalized with end user data, apps, settings and policies and accessible by end users with Single Sign on (SSO) technology for a great user experience, that is secure and easy to manage.

VMware vSAN is an Ideal Infrastructure for Virtual Desktops

vSAN delivers the storage performance critical to ensuring virtual desktops and apps
meet the expectations of users accustomed to physical devices. vSAN is native in the
vSphere hypervisor and gives you the highest level of performance without taxing the
CPU with additional overhead like virtual storage appliances, which run separately on the
hypervisor. vSAN integrates storage policies into the VM-creation workflow, ensuring each virtual desktop automatically has the type of storage it needs.

vSAN also simplifies storage management for desktops and apps by eliminating traditional,
purpose-built storage systems and by letting IT use familiar vCenter tools rather than
proprietary storage-management interfaces. vSAN integrates storage policies into the
VM-creation workflow, ensuring each virtual desktop automatically has the type of
storage it needs. There are no additional VMs or virtual appliances to install; you can
enable vSAN with just a few clicks. vSAN lets you set automated storage policies at the
VM level, allowing storage to self-tune and balance according to desktop and app
demand.

United States Senate Federal Credit Union:
“Using vSAN, we were able to cut our anticipated costs of equipping our three branches with hyperconverged infrastructure from approximately $350,000 down to less than $120,000, a 66 percent savings”

Queen Margaret University:
“The speed in which we are able to get Horizon 7 up and running was a real gain. We never want deployments to interrupt the teaching environment”

Intel Select Solutions

Intel Select Solutions are pre-defined, workload-optimized solutions designed to minimize the challenges of infrastructure evaluation and deployment. Solutions are validated by OEMs/ODMs, certified by ISVs, and verified by Intel. Intel develops these solutions in extensive collaboration with hardware, software, and operating system vendor partners and with the world’s leading data center and service providers.

Next Steps

Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Optane are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.

Sources:
https://builders.intel.com/doc/vmware-intel-vdi-solution.pdf