Next up in our series of Top 5 Questions to ask a VDI vendor – it’s all about scalability.

Can your VDI vendor scale at the rate you need it to?  Can it handle your current servers and desktops and grow with you over the long term?

If you’re like most companies, it’s hard to envision where you may be in five years.  However, the last thing you want to do is make a technology investment today that won’t support you tomorrow.

With VDI, it’s easy to just dip your big toe in and test the waters with a small deployment.  It’s a great way to start and many vendors even offer trials.  But it’s critical to make sure that once you get rolling, you can continue to grow.  Plain and simple, can the platform scale?  How much?  Can you scale up and scale down?

The latest VDI Gen2 solutions offer the greatest advancement in scalability due to their cluster architecture and distributed connection brokering.  The platform is built to scale.  As your organization grows, simply add additional nodes to the cluster.

But scalability isn’t just about growth.  It’s also about supporting high volumes of users at the same time, something that many Gen1 vendors quite frankly have challenges with.  VDI Gen2 solutions also tackle this challenge – dynamically routing users sessions to the least busy and memory optimized server, ensuring no single point of failure or choke point and allowing greater availability and scalability.

Education is one of the many industries where supporting a large number of users simultaneously is critical.  Dalian University recently turned to Virtual Bridges VERDE VDI Gen2 after learning first hand that VDI Gen1 solutions could not handle their needs.

“We have tried other competitive VDI products and found them very lacking in significant areas which are most important in an educational setting,” said Professor Zhang Wei, Ph.D. and vice president of NII.  “VERDE solves one of the most difficult problems encountered in today’s VDI environment – handling a large number of users conducting similar operations at the exact same time.  This scenario is very often encountered in a classroom lecture or when large numbers of students are taking the same examination online.”

So as you look at the different solutions, make sure to challenge each vendor and make sure they can handle all of your scalability needs.  Interestingly, the recent Kaviza/Citrix deal creates quite a few question marks around scale.  There’s no planned link between the two solutions, so there’s limited opportunity to scale.

As Gabe Knuth put it on BrianMadden.com, “Citrix states that there is no license upgrade path because the solutions are ‘aimed for different audiences and needs.’ Some people may be alarmed by that, especially if they already have Kaviza and are on the cusp of needing to upgrade to something like XenDesktop.  What is Citrix likely to sell if a company comes to them looking for a VDI solution for, say, 300 users?  Do they suggest going with Kaviza, the simpler solution and potential ‘easy win,’ or do they go with XenDesktop, which may be too much for that size of a deployment?  If a customer chooses Kaviza, then outgrows it in a year, they’ll have to buy an entirely new solution.”

That’s crazy!!!  There’s no need to buy different VDI solutions when there are real solutions that can fit your needs right now and can grow with you down the road.

And remember to also ask:

Does your VDI solution support offline users?

Does your VDI vendor require costly network, storage and desktop upgrades?