OK – so the VDI market space is definitely moving at a break neck pace. We are in the midst of a perfect storm of data center compute solutions, storage performance with flash technology and user access and mobility with the BYOD revolution. Seems like we are already at VDI 2.0 and most of the implementations I run into are already behind the curve at version 1.0 or nothing at all – or are they?

Pure all flash storage solutions definitely seem to have a good corner case fit for this workload – or at least part of it. The desktop itself – the core OS image and application(s) layer seem to fit well into the all flash and deduplication methods of the all flash solutions. However, I think this comes at a cost – the true cost of capacity for the users behind the desktops.

If you have already migrated all of the user data out of the desktop image leaving only the profile/persona behind, then thin (Linked Clone or PVS) or fat (Full) desktops can be traded off by how you want to manage OS and application updates and pools of desktops. Stateless or Persistent desktops don’t impose that much impact on the infrastructure – but they do affect the user experience.

Question: Do I need to have distinctly different storage platforms for the different parts of my virtualization infrastructure or is there a better, easier to manage model. Traditional spinning disk only solutions have obvious drawbacks of size, cost, and complexity even if the performance measure is easy – just add more spindles and capacity increases too. All flash solutions make performance measures easy – they are fast – all fast – just get enough space to support the workload. How much space that is depends on a lot of variables – namely deduplication and thin provisioning methods and frequency and uniformity of data updates.

I think hybrid solutions provide the best of both technologies. Performance and capacity sizing is still required and although this is a new type of sizing exercise for many storage admins, it is not rocket science. With this hybrid storage (flash + disk) approach you can get the performance (maybe not at screaming levels) needed to support the active workload and the capacity (definitely not at screaming prices) to store the rest of the less-used infrastructure data.

My bet is that all flash solutions will allow IT teams to deploy some interesting VDI solutions, but be prepared for the added cost – the per desktop OS/application layer will be higher than hybrid solutions and there will likely be another storage requirement somewhere else in the picture to hold the user data that lies somewhere between the desktop background image and the corporate file share repository.

The Price is Right???

With all this hoopla over performance by these arrays, the element of cost per desktop seems to have gotten lost. Some of the other commentators have picked up on this, too.

With appliances costing over $100K/TB, the economics seem a bit strained. Remember, what is being replaced is a $300 notebook. Given a raw but stingy 20GB per desktop equivalent, at $50K/TB for an Accela flash array this alone is $1,000 per seat. Add in the VMWare, amortize the large server running the VDI, and provide a thin desktop, and the economics are really strange. Of course, thin provisioning and dedupe help a lot, but the numbers are still upside down.