This blog was written by Chhandomay Mandal, Solutions Marketing Director for XtremIO
XtremIO transforms the way you deliver VDI. Whether you are rolling out 100 or 100,000 desktops, whether your users are call-center employees or sophisticated CAD designers, whether you are an 8 to 6 organization or you follow the sun with 24×7 operations, XtremIO delivers an incredibly cost effective, agile VDI storage platform with an amazingly consistent user experience.
Here are the top 10 reasons why our customers deploy virtual desktops on XtremIO:
1. Unparalleled user experience – at scale, all the time, for any user type
XtremIO delivers an unparalleled user experience for ALL user and desktop types at any scale, all the time. With its massive I/O performance, XtremIO ensures that every desktop is providing an ideal user experience. Virtual desktops running on XtremIO have applications that respond instantly and consistently, faster than on physical desktops. With XtremIO, every VDI user enjoys the best user experience.
2. Completely stormproof VDI environment
XtremIO delivers very high performance with consistently low sub-ms latencies, irrespective of the VDI workload. The user experience is unaffected by boot storms, antivirus scans, suspend/resume operations, application peak demands, user activity, or used capacity on the XtremIO array. XtremIO delivers any desired level of performance, from tens of thousands of IOPS to peak rates of hundreds of thousands of IOPS in large VDI deployments.
3. Dramatically reduced VDI storage capacity needs
XtremIO’s always-on, real-time inline data reduction technology dramatically shrinks the amount of storage capacity required to support VDI environments. Thousands of virtual desktops can be deployed with only a few terabytes of flash. For the first time, full clone desktops can be deployed easily and cost-effectively, allowing existing desktop management tools and applications to be re-used in virtual desktop environments. Non-persistent desktops can also be used alone or in combination with persistent desktops. Administrators no longer need to de-feature desktops or be limited to non-persistent desktops. Every desktop can be fully functional, customizable, and affordable.
4. Rapid virtual desktop provisioning
With XtremIO, VM cloning with hypervisor’s copy offload primitives (like VAAI Copy Offload or X-COPY for VMware and ODX for Hyper-V/Windows Server) is a control plane operation, unlike other arrays where it a data plane operation involving SSDs. As XtremIO doesn’t store any duplicate data globally across the cluster and the deduplication happens inline and in-memory, the copy operation in XtremIO is at RAM speed without consuming any extra space, and the host sees effective throughput higher than the physical bandwidth available! This fast cloning has nothing to do with SSDs; it is because of how XtremIO manages copies with the metadata pointers in the system, all stored in RAM! Thus, with XtremIO, VM cloning and virtual desktop provisioning tasks are carried out at memory speed, rather than SSD speed.
5. Radically simple admin experience
With all the technical innovations, it is important not to lose sight of one of the most powerful benefits of XtremIO: radical simplicity. It’s truly as easy as 1-2-3 to configure, deploy, and tune all the workloads – VDI included – you want to throw at it. Literally there are three steps: 1) Create the volumes – any number of any sizes you want. 2) Create the initiator groups for all the hosts and their applications. 3) Map the volumes to those initiator groups. That’s it. No tuning, nothing else. As an admin, you can get your life back!
6. Reduced planning complexity
With XtremIO’s scale-out storage, you can start small and grow incrementally to nearly any scale without any service disruption. You add an X-Brick to your existing XtremIO cluster when you need to grow your VDI environment, and XtremIO automatically rebalances both metadata and data across the entire cluster while all applications keep running with the same performance levels. This online expansion is completely transparent to your VDI users, and your VDI storage planning complexity is virtually eliminated.
7. Industry leading integration with VDI platforms and hypervisors
XtremIO provides the ability to easily deploy VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenDesktop virtual desktops from VMware vCenter within seconds with the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI). Pools of hundreds of desktops can be set up and ready for user logins within an hour. This is achieved by taking a the original image and creating fast clones with in-memory metadata updates consuming no additional Flash capacity, and then registering these clone images in the VDI desktop catalog and powering them up.
8. Turnkey VDI solution options with converged infrastructure and Federation EUC
VCE Vblock 540 is a converged appliance with a single point of management for all servers, networking and XtremIO that are pre-integrated, pre-engineered and tested at factory for a complete, turnkey, truly plug-n-play VDI solution. Additionally, XtremIO is a key component of the EMC Federation End-User Computing (Fed EUC) solution, a complete end-to-end VDI solution with integrated components for infrastructure and virtualization software along with management tools for virtual desktop deployment orchestration and automation, support desk, and application delivery.
9. Unmatched TCO and $/desktop for ALL desktop types
XtremIO redefines VDI deployments, ushering in a new era of unparalleled user experience and unprecedented simplicity, all at the lowest cost. Whether you are deploying task worker desktops for call center employees or high performance desktops for software developers, you always get an unmatched TCO and lowest cost per desktop. XtremIO makes all-flash storage for VDI completely affordable.
10. One platform to rule them ALL
XtremIO does VDI extremely well, but it does mixed workload storage consolidation even better. You can run all of your virtualized and tier-1 workloads, including VDI, on the same XtremIO all-flash array. This potential for mixed workload storage consolidation has been promised for years, but no storage architecture could deliver the consistent scale-out performance required to meet so many combined SLAs. XtremIO’s clean sheet design with innovative use of Flash technologies for its true N-way active-active scale out architecture, advanced in-line all the time data services making it very cost-effective, and unique copy data management coupled with automated self-service workflows for application administrators enable organizations to not only improve their infrastructure and application agility but also transform their businesses.
Learn more about VDI with XtremIO here.
