Top Five Reasons Your Company Needs VMware Horizon View 5.2

Abstract

With the growth of bring your own device (BYOD) and mobility, users are increasingly asking for computing anywhere from any device at any time. Users now expect productivity on the go with a desktop that can be freely accessed and secure. We're no longer a society that sits at a desk to be productive. The VMware Horizon Suite allows the datacenter administrators to satisfy the accelerated mobility needs of the workforce while still maintaining an IT solution that is easily managed and secure.

Sample

Introduction

VMware Horizon View is a universal client solution that enables users to access their desktops, data, and applications as they've come to expect - anywhere, anytime, and from any device. With the advent of the personal computer, the IT group lost control of desktop computing, and now it's time to seize control of the end user computer again and move it back into the datacenter. VMware Horizon View provides this opportunity. With VMware Horizon View, users get an individualized view of their applications and data on any device of their choosing; virtual desktops do not need the complexity, power, or operational expenses like physical desktops. Data and applications are secure in the datacenter with logical and physical security, plus administrators can quickly respond to application demands, provisioning more resources as needed. Horizon View can provision additional desktops without administrator intervention, reducing manual tasks associated with provisioning for additional capacity and new users. Virtual machines (VMs) are easy to copy, simplifying business continuity planning and disaster recovery. Thin clients consume approximately ten percent of the actual power consumption of a physical desktop. There are five top reasons why your company needs VMware Horizon View 5.2:

 - New, advanced hardware support focused on VDI
 - Simplified bring your own device (BYOD) solutions
 - Tight integration with the VMware Horizon Suite
 - New and improved VMware Horizon View 5.2 features
 - Market projections

This white paper will cover these top five reasons why a company needs VMware Horizon View 5.2 and some considerations for each point. This paper assumes that the reader has some technical experience with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and VMware Horizon View.

5. New Advanced Hardware Support Focused on VDI

Flash-based storage

The adoption of VDI is prompting a change in the way we build and manage our storage systems. Many organizations, though supporting the idea of VDI integration, have failed to implement this technology, primarily because of performance and cost concerns. The root cause of many VDI deployment failures is storage. Storage systems can be put under extreme stress when trying to fulfill the data requests of hundreds or potentially thousands of virtual desktops. A driving factor for VDI performance is the number of input/output operations per second (IOPS) that the storage system can execute. Slow I/O will cause poor response times and, more importantly, user complaints. Legacy, disk-based storage was not designed to keep up with the economic and performance challenges of a modern VDI deployment; matching the IOPS of a physical desktop with a virtual datacenter has been one of the major roadblocks to VDI adoption.

The larger storage vendors are addressing the IOPS issue by adapting their current systems with the addition of solid-state drives (SSDs), used for caching, to take care of the I/O operations while still using traditional spindle disks for capacity on the back-end. As flash storage becomes more commonplace, VDI has become a more attractive solution for many organizations. Flash storage provides better performance with consistently low latency and also delivers other features like compression and inline de-duplication, both of which can help lower the cost. Not only are the larger vendors addressing VDI issues, but also there has been a surge of new storage systems: many start-ups that target VDI and other high-IOPS environments. Most of these consist of appliances storage and servers using flash, packaged usually as all-SSD or hybrid SSD, and traditional spindle-based hard drive boxes. These packages are paired with software and operating systems (OSs) that make data processing as efficient as possible to get the most performance out of the spindles.

GPU advancements

In recent history, there have been major advancements with graphics processing units (GPUs) and this is being integrated by VMware to add full hardware graphics acceleration to their VDI products. There are two main ways that this is being implemented. First, the individual desktop VMs are now able to access shared GPUs in the VDI servers, allowing users to run applications that require GPUs (such as CAD, 3-D modeling, etc.). This allows multiple users to share common hardware and ensures that VMs running on a single server can now economically support a higher consolidation of users and desktops while providing native graphics and GPU computing performance. Secondly, the NVIDIA VGX GPU hypervisor is a software layer that can integrate into a commercially available hypervisor, which effectively enables access to virtualized GPU resources. This leverages GPUs in VDI servers to do hardware-based encoding of the graphics streams for the remote protocols. The upshot is that there is now the ability to have high-quality graphics over a lower bandwidth connection without creating an enormous CPU load on the server, since the GPUs can handle graphical computations.