In one of Brian Madden’s latest blog posts for TechTarget magazine, he brings up a really good question about “scale” in a VDI deployment.
With “How do you stop a VDI deployment in its tracks? Scale up!” – Madden writes:
It’s often said that VDI is one of the most piloted yet least rolled-out technologies. One of the common reasons why a VDI deployment doesn’t make it big: It’s not easy to smoothly scale a single-server pilot into a full-fledged enterprise environment.
Part of the problem, according to Madden, is that at some point, you’re going to hit a ceiling for just how large you can scale your initial VDI project. And at that point, he says, “the only way to grow your VDI deployment is to rip out everything you’ve built so far and start over with a new architecture that’s appropriately sized for your load.”
Indeed, the subject of scalability is a hot topic, and one that we often hear about from prospects as well. So we’re glad that Brian Madden is bringing the topic of scalability to the forefront.
However, this is definitely another case where not all VDI vendors are created equally. The fact is, I would argue that the ease of scalability is a function of the software architecture. For example, Web servers are architected to scale horizontally. As your Web traffic increases, you simply add more servers and sometimes additional storage capacity.
The challenge is that many VDI solutions, including the two most vocal vendors, DO NOT scale horizontally. In fact, Citrix and VMware have multiple software components each of which has its own scaling rules — thus making the process very difficult.
Virtual Bridges VERDE, on the other hand, does in fact scale horizontally, just like a Web server. There is a single, identical software component installed on every server. And increasing the number of desktops simply means increasing the number of servers and adding storage capacity as needed.
When you start off really small with just local storage, and then later, when you want to scale out and move to shared storage, it is very easy to do with VERDE. It’s simply a matter of copying files from local storage to shared storage and then pointing your servers to the new storage. And with that, your system is up and running again! Done. We recently had a customer completely change out their storage infrastructure without any downtime for their production users.
The truth is scalability can be an issue with all software, not just VDI. It requires planning and designing the right solution architecture that meets your future needs. At Virtual Bridges, our solution architects work with the customer to understand future scaling needs and leverage our simple scaling architecture to use a building block approach. In that way, scaling from 200 to 2000 users simply means adding additional server and storage blocks. And beyond that, you can continue to scale to hundreds of thousands of users. There is no need to replace or throw out existing blocks.
We agree, scalability is definitely something that organizations should question when looking at VDI vendors. And again, it is important to keep in mind that not all VDI products are alike. Any company that is considering a VDI deployment with plans to scale should definitely give Virtual Bridges a call.
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In the virtualization circles that I travel, my friends and fellow virt enthusiasts have never once accused Brian Madden of holding back or keeping his opinions to himself. He speaks his mind, says what he means and means what he says. And while I don’t always have to agree or disagree with his positions or statements made, I personally find his openness quite refreshing.
