What is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and why you should care?

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI is one of those IT mega trends that have been skyrocketing during this work from times. Let me explain why so many companies are rushing to VDI and why you should consider it too. I am the biggest fan of simplification and optimization and that's why VDI is so interesting to me. So when HPE and Intel asked me if I could make a video about VDI they did not have to finish the sentence. So thank you HPE and Intel for sponsoring this video and letting me talk about this super interesting topic. Now if we think how most people work today, employees have their own PCs and laptops with applications installed locally plus lots of computing storage capacity. However, there are quite a few challenges with this. First of all most of the time only a fraction of those resources are in use. Using a VPN connection might be overwhelming, if not impossible at times. Not to mention that corporate VPNs most of the time are not designed to sustain peaking traffics like during these strange times. And what happens if your laptop gets stolen or you delete a file accidentally? Are you sure your backups are fine? Also, since all your apps are installed on your device, you have to use your device to be able to work. Now how about if we moved all those apps and all the data to a secure dedicated and centralized data center with lots of shared compute and storage capacity. And then we give employees a remote access to those apps and data from wherever with whatever device. You can use laptops, tablets, PCs, phones you name it. Whatever device has at least some processing power and access to the Internet. No more wasted capacity, all the resources are fully optimized. You can also forget all the hassle with VPNs. A secure stable connection is automatically opened. You can also access all your apps and data from any device. And remember the data is in the data center so not much damage if you lose your laptop or delete a file. It's all secured at all times So business continuity gets a huge bump with VDI. And that is actually one of the main drivers for businesses moving to VDI. I know what you're thinking now. You have a faint memory of seeing a VDI solution at some conference some 10 years ago with stuttering video and breaking connections, right? Well that's not 2020 anymore. Actually you get exactly the same user experience as you would get with your laptop. In fact you should remember the demand this from your VDI vendor. Let me use a real-life example to go a bit deeper. The Netherlands Cancer Institute or NKI is one of the foremost cancer research centres in the world. They wanted to improve their IT agility and performance to support their research projects and clinical services and they chose to go the VDI way. VDI is first and foremost a new way of working, not a technology. VDI is built on top of technology and that's why the first and most important step for NKI was to design the big picture. This can actually be a pretty overwhelming task. I've seen HPE putting a lot of effort in VDI already for quite a few years and as an example of that just recently CRN listed five reasons why specifically HPE’s VDI solutions are seeing a surge during these strange times. So NKI also decided to team up with HPE and their professional Pointnext Services for the planning and designing phase. Together they ended up splitting the data center environment in two functions. One infrastructure is running 400 virtual machines on four HPE Synergy frames full of Intel Xeon scalable powered compute nodes. The second environment is running virtual desktops on VMware Horizon View. The underlying computer cluster is one of the largest in the Netherlands: 78 HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 10’s also with Intel Xeon scalable processors. If you are familiar with virtual machines, virtual desktops are just a type of a VM. Unlike virtual servers, virtual desktops require quite a lot more graphics power, since we might need to transfer the desktop image stream over the network or sometimes we need dedicated graphics power for video editing etc So NKI decided to add three NVIDIA T4 Enterprise GPUs to each of the 78 Proliant DL servers. So, what’s the end result of all of this? Around 2000 virtual desktops running during the day time. Physicians and nurses have access to the same virtual desktop session with whatever device from wherever in the hospital area they are. It saves them a lot of time. However during the night time there's only about 500 virtual desktop sessions in use so to optimize resource usage, NKI has put these these idle servers to run batch processes during the night time. This way they have managed to cut down batch processing from 60 minutes all the way down to 10 minutes. This was just one of the many examples how VDI enables new unthinkable ways of working. I hope you enjoyed the video! Hit like and remember to subscribe! Until the next!

Channel: Markus Leinonen

Views: 26,827

Rating: 4.9749999 out of 5

Keywords: VDI, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Virtual Desktops, HPE VDI, HPE Synergy, HPE ProLiant, HPE PointNext, PointNext, Intel Xeon, Intel Xeon Scalable, NKI, Desktop Virtualisation, VMware, Intel, VMware Horizon View, HPE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, what is vdi, virtual desktops, hosted desktop, desktop pool, application virtualization, remote desktop, virtual desktop, daas, desktop as a service

Id: weII6qT59mQ

Length: 5min 51sec (351 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020