Bringing VDI to its full potential through storage management

Pankaj Gupta, country manager-Solutions Marketing, Dell India

Small and medium businesses have a lot to benefit from the adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) within their existing IT set-up. With the adoption of a clear desktop virtualisation strategy, IT managers can ensure better IT management, improved security, easier regulatory compliance and, in time and reduce overall desktop infrastructure costs.

However, enterprises often find that VDI can fail to bring a favourable return on investment because of storage demands that it places on IT infrastructure. In order to reap full benefits of desktop virtualization, IT organizations must devote time and resources to prepare their data centers for rigorous demands of desktop virtualization.

Organizations can only expect to see adequate return on investment from their desktop virtualisation if suitable storage infrastructure has been put in place. Several problems arise as a result of VDI implementation and these can hamper the overall functioning of IT infrastructure.

This article highlights some of the ways by which organizations can reap the benefits of VDI without compromising on the storage demands of a company.

Managing the Data Deluge

Support of desktop virtualisation could and in most instances mean increase in number of virtual desktop clients and that too at an exponential pace. This leads to significant increase in the number of active operating systems running within an enterprise. Consequently, the storage demand of the enterprise increases as it is now storing the data of all these 50 to 80 virtual desktop clients.

Many of these clients may even be sending files to each other leading to duplication of storage requirements. Hence, the overall performance of the IT environment gets affected.

To overcome this, organizations can make use of thin clones. A thin clone is a copy of a master file which, when duplicated only stores the changes that have been made to the file. By using a thin clone the overall storage requirements of the enterprise is reduced significantly as large volumes of duplicate data that exist for operating systems, applications and other resources running on the virtual desktops is eliminated.

For example, without thin clones, and assuming a desktop image file of 10GB, an organization would need 10 terabytes of storage space to support a 1,000-seat virtual desktop deployment. However, with thin clone technology, IT managers need to store only a small number of master image files, plus an additional 10 per cent of the image size for each virtual desktop. That is nearly a 90 per cent reduction in storage capacity needs.

Reducing storage costs

Additionally, supporting desktop virtualization can sometimes work out to be more expensive than cost per desktop because maintaining storage on the storage area network (SAN) is very expensive. For example, traditional desktop architectures rely heavily on direct-attached storage using the relatively inexpensive hard drives shipped with each desktop device.

However, desktop virtualization moves user data and applications to enterprise-class drive arrays. While this may significantly boost the performance and reliability, what also gets affected is the cost. Therefore, it is important for storage systems to be optimized for desktop virtualization. IT organizations should invest in tools that support such virtualization systems simplify storage management, improve performance and help build a resilient virtual infrastructure.

Software Upgradation

Supporting and managing large pools of virtualized desktops can be a major challenge. Applications and software are constantly changing and updating. Virtualised desktops cannot be exempted from this process and applications and software on virtualised desktops have to be consequently updated.

These manual updates to each virtual desktop can be time-consuming and more complex than managing a physical desktop. In such situations, IT managers can use thin clones to quickly and easily perform mass deployments and software updates, including security patching, to virtual desktops in large environments.

Opt for storage that is scalable

Finally, administrators managing a virtualized desktop environment need to take into consideration the growth trends of the organisation in terms of the number of desktop clients that they will have to support in the future. Storage systems should be easily scalable, without disruption and the IT infrastructure of the organization should be at pace as new departments are formed in the organization and additional users are added within the system.

To meet the demands of such situations, IT managers should ideally adopt scalable storage technologies that fully virtualize the physical storage resources. Thus there is a shared storage pool across storage arrays within the group and storage workloads are load balanced across the group.

Storage is a critical component of success for any virtualization system. In order for IT mangers to be successful in their virtualization strategy, they should make the implementations highlighted in this article at the early stages of adoption of desktop virtualization. IT managers must be well-aware of their storage needs, identify the right storage technologies and use this knowledge to implement systems powerful enough to handle the challenges that are an inevitable part of desktop virtualization deployments.