Work from Home with Horizon View Cloud and NetApp – Remote Connected Infrastructures
Chris "C-Rod" Rodriguez
Due to the spread of COVID-19, the world is adjusting to a “new normal”—working from home. Many companies have increased or changed their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) footprint to meet the demands of their users who are working from home, whether they are the developers who are creating applications for the end users or customers, or the customers or end users who employ these applications. End-user computing (EUC) solutions were created to meet these demands across many workloads, on premises, in the cloud, or remote.
The NetApp® HCI, NVIDIA, and VMware solution aims to address every possible workload for an EUC remote connected infrastructure. These proven NetApp EUC and VDI solutions are not a response to the current crisis; they’ve been available for several years. Through simplicity to scale, flexible architecture, and guaranteed performance, NetApp HCI is the foundation of any complete VDI solution, local or remote. NetApp’s vast portfolio of cloud products and NAS products and our trusted partnerships combine to create an EUC solution that is built for the present and the future.
NetApp is proud to be a presenter at the VMUG Virtual EUC Day. For the event, we created a video that explains NetApp products for VMware Horizon View. The video describes what makes NetApp HCI the number one choice as the foundation for any EUC solution. Whether customers need to move to the cloud or to a remote connected infrastructure that is on their premises, NetApp has the hybrid cloud products to meet their needs. The flexibility to grow their existing on-premises infrastructure based on what they need when they need it is what makes NetApp’s EUC and VDI products superior.
In addition, it’s fast and simple to grow VDIs in the cloud with Horizon View Cloud and Azure NetApp Files. With the cloud, there’s no hardware infrastructure procurement and installation process. The following figure shows a NetApp hybrid cloud example of Horizon View Cloud with Azure NetApp Files in Azure and NetApp HCI and AFF for on-premises VDI sessions and VDI CIFS requirements (profiles and home directories).
Here are some of the benefits of using NetApp HCI and AFF for on premises and Azure NetApp Files for Azure:
- Performance. NetApp is 6 times faster than competitors’ file systems in the cloud, and we set the SPC1 and SPC3 benchmarks with AFF for on premises.
- Flexibility Separate compute nodes and storage nodes in NetApp HCI are ideal for VDI. You will always have more compute nodes than storage nodes in VDI. Also, you benefit from lower core licensing costs.
- Whether in the cloud or on the premises, you get ease and speed of deployment.
- Full EUC products. NetApp storage products in the cloud and on the premises offer a truly hybrid cloud experience for EUC with Horizon View Cloud. Many competitors provide only one or the other and call it a hybrid cloud solution.
- NetApp provides full user data security capabilities, such as multifactor authentication, in the public cloud and on the premises.
We have also worked with VMware and NVIDIA to create solutions that address performance for task workers, knowledge workers, and power users. Our architecture solutions also fit the artificial intelligence, deep learning, and machine learning initiatives of many industries.
Consolidate Mixed Workloads and Control Performance
Many vendors have maximums or rate limiting. This isn’t a difficult feature to implement, and it’s primarily meant to protect the array, not the workloads. Some vendors have a prioritization or fair queuing system, which simply punishes all workloads in a similar queue equally. The superiority of NetApp HCI quality of service lies in its ability to provision both performance and capacity resources independently, to guarantee both per workload, and to allow administrators to know, monitor, trend, manage, and adjust those allocations in real time. How does it work? Each volume is configured with minimum, maximum, and burst IOPS values that are strictly enforced within the system. The minimum IOPS provides a guarantee for performance, independent of what other applications on the system are doing. The maximum and burst values control the allocation of performance and deliver consistent performance to workloads. NetApp HCI, with its unique QOS capabilities, allows you to consolidate previously siloed applications, easily support multiple mixed workloads, and address all performance-related challenges in a single system.
Improve Performance and Lower Your TCO
With NetApp HCI, you remove the expensive graphics workstation from the desktop. Early internal testing indicates that this solution offers some impressive performance improvements:- More than 2 times higher performance than the previous generation for certain CAD applications
- More than 6 times higher performance than the previous generation for certain medical imaging applications
- Comparable performance to NVIDIA Pascal, using only a third of the power and in only half the size
Start accelerating your VDI today. Review the H615C specifications and gain more in-depth information from the newly released technical report.
Chris "C-Rod" Rodriguez
Chris (C-Rod) Rodriguez is a EUC/VDI infrastructure specialist at NetApp and is in NetApp engineering. C-Rod has worked with all primary product lines at NetApp in a VDI capacity. In EUC/VDI engineering at NetApp, C-Rod has conducted many VDI reference architectures, VDI sales enablement documentation, VDI customer presentations, and VDI post sales installations. C-Rod has 30 years of VDI experience and he has been working with VMware Horizon View since the beginning and he has worked with Citrix since 1990. In addition, he has worked with many other small third-party VDI companies. Currently, C-Rod has been working with EUC Hybrid Cloud and EUC Public Cloud Solutions and many of the Public Cloud VDI Control Plane management companies.
