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Best-In-Class Vendors Partner to Build A Best-In-Class VDI Solution

By Nanjunda Somyaji posted Aug 18, 2015 09:00 AM

  

Few years back, enterprises were evaluating Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to see whether VDI is a viable technology while reducing cost of operations. As proof-of-concept, they deployed VDI in a selected group to evaluate and understand the issues. During this time, VDI was still expensive, hard to manage and Enterprises did not see expected ROI.

 

Fast forward and VDI technologies have matured thanks to technologies that include: Virtual SAN, vRealize Operations and LogInsight, better networks and low-cost flash storage. These developments are pushing enterprises to deploy VDI across the organization’s infrastructure.

 

Brocade has partnered with Avago (VMworld US only), SanDisk and VMware to build and validate VDI Reference Architecture based on All-Flash Virtual SAN that is affordable, high-performance and easy to deploy. This reference architecture comprises of Avago’s Storage controller and SanDisk’s high performance Flash storage and Brocade’s VCS Ethernet Fabric.

 

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One might ask, what is network doing here, or specifically Brocade’s value in a VDI solution. If you look at the VDI architecture as a three legged stool - with Compute, Storage and Network - you get the picture. VMware Virtual SAN – specifically All Flash Virtual SAN - is one of the key VMware technologies used in this reference architecture to make it affordable and high-performance . Since Virtual SAN is distributed across vSphere Clusters, one needs a predictable, high performance and resilient network and Brocade VCS Ethernet Fabric is built to provide exactly the same. In other words, the Network Matters!

 

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While Brocade VCS provides the reliable, high performance and scalable network to deploy VDI infrastructure, Brocade Traffic Manager (vTM) will make this solution scalable by providing load balancing functionality for the Horizon View Connection Server and Horizon View Security Server. 

 

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My friend at VMware, Abid Saeed, has blogged about the overall reference architecture and Biswapati Bhattacharjee from SanDisk discussed the value of SanDisk SSDs used in this solution. Please go and check out their blogs that provides all the juicy details about the architecture, and nice performance numbers that we were able to get out of the validated reference architecture during our testing.

 

VDI at VMWorld

In just a few weeks, VMworld will take over San Francisco and we partnered with Avago, SanDisk and VMware to showcase this solution in order to share our experiences attendees in a panel session. In this session we plan to discuss details about how best of the breed products are used to provide cost effective VDI solution, as well as best practices to deploy VDI workloads using VMware Horizon View based all-flash Virtual SAN infrastructure. Make sure that you have the session EUC6510-SPO in your schedule.

 

By the way, don't forget to visit Brocade booth (#412) and other partner booths mentioned above at VMworld 2015 and check out all the demos, technical talks and fun activities.

 

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Additional Resources:

  • Brocade vTM solution guide provides more details about deploying the Traffic Manager in a VMware VDI environment

 

Note: This blog was originally written in September for VMworld US. It has been updated to reflect Brocade's presence at VMworld Barcelona in October.


#BrocadeFibreChannelNetworkingCommunity
#vmware
#SanDisk
#vRealize
#VirtualSAN
#VSAN
#Avago
#vdi
#virtualtrafficmanager
#vcs
#vmworld
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