Cost and Complexity: Game-stoppers for VDI

A guest post by Andy Melmed from Sanbolic

Two of the biggest impediments surrounding VDI deployments, we know, are cost and complexity… and understandably so, seeing how both can have such a detrimental effect on the overall ROI of VDI.

At Sanbolic, we readily acknowledge that concerns over cost (in terms of time, effort and dollars) and complexity (lots of moving parts, each of which entails installation, configuration, management and maintenance) can cause anyone to hesitate pursuing a VDI deployment. And why not? After all, with current economic conditions forcing businesses to tighten the lid on their coffers and squeeze as much productivity as possible out of limited resources, IT administrators, already overwhelmed with their daily tasks and responsibilities, are left with little (if any) time or motivation to start a VDI Project. So how can organizations with such anxieties (time, personnel and $) get started on a VDI PoC to see if it’s actually something that could be of benefit to them?

Well, let’s look at the evidence. Despite mainstream thinking about the potentially high cost and complexity of VDI, organizations that have deployed VDI PoCs using Citrix® XenDesktop® and Sanbolic® Melio™ were able to do so in less time and with lower upfront and ongoing costs than they had envisioned. How? By combining the unique and innovative data and storage management capabilities of Melio with the simplicity and speed of provisioning virtual desktops using the Provisioning Services™ (PVS™) component of Citrix XenDesktop.

After installing the Melio software on multiple PVS servers, these companies created flexible, scalable, highly available pools of shared storage in less than 20 minutes (!) to enable high availability for the virtual desktops streamed on demand by PVS. In addition, Melio also greatly simplified the management and maintenance of their desktop image files (vDisks) by allowing the PVS servers to share concurrent read-and-write access to a single pool of storage containing the vDisks.

Significant cost savings were achieved by these companies using Melio to pool the internal disk drives of their PVS servers to create the shared storage for PVS HA, instead of having to spend valuable time and money researching, procuring, installing, configuring, managing and maintaining hardware-based SAN storage. The ability of Melio to create a software-based shared storage “appliance” out of the local storage within the PVS servers to store vDisks is one of the key reasons these organizations were able to reduce both the cost and complexity of their VDI PoCs. Once they determined VDI would be beneficial, they were able to keep cost and complexity at a minimum by moving their VDI deployments into production quickly and easily using the same server/storage platform they used to conduct their successful PoCs.

As they began realizing the benefits of VDI in production, they were able to increase their ROI using Melio to scale their infrastructures (servers and storage) seamlessly while maintaining optimal performance levels for desktop users. Taking advantage of the VSS-based snapshots provided by Melio for reliable protection of desktop images, and implementing active/active or active/passive (DR) configurations for PVS across geographically dispersed sites using Melio’s mirroring capability, further added to their overall ROI in VDI.
 
So if your organization has been considering VDI for a while, but has hesitated because of concerns regarding its perceived cost and complexity, visit Sanbolic at www.sanbolic.com and learn how other organizations used Melio to overcome their concerns and realize the benefits of VDI.

With Melio, cost and complexity don’t have to be game-stoppers for VDI any longer.
 
Cheers,
Andy