Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Solution Overview

Improving User Experience is a Key Factor in VDI Success

A successful virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) requires careful attention to the end-user experience. Ensuring your hardware choices can perform well under the load is paramount for success. While CPU and memory play a critical role in VDI performance, your underlying storage subsystem can be the most challenging component. Where traditional spinning disks have limitations in their ability to provide VDI with the resources to satisfy the intense input/output (I/O) demands, Kingston datacenter solid-state disks (SSDs) provide a simpler, more scalable solution for VDI storage.

Ensure End-User Performance

The end-user experience is the most critical factor in VDI success. Users expect performance on-par with current single-user PCs and laptops which are often equipped with SSD storage. When you multiply hundreds – or even thousands – of users running on a single platform, you need fast storage that can keep up, ensuring users have a great experience with VDI.

Data center SSDs ensure the performance of your VDI sessions is as good – or better – than a traditional desktop experience. SSDs have an innate ability to keep pace with intense user applications and keep things running smoothly and seamlessly compared to traditional spinning disk drives.

Fast End-User Log On Times

The first exposure a user has to the performance of VDI is in the time it takes to log on and begin working. The logon process can be I/O intensive and users need to be productive as soon as possible. Solid-state disks ensure logon times are fast and responsive due to significantly faster write I/O performance compared to traditional spinning disks, so your users start working quickly.

Handle Boot Storms Elegantly

The boot process of Windows operating systems places high demands on storage, even with a newer operating system like Windows 10. With VDI, you need to be able to quickly boot hundreds of systems under an array of circumstances so that the platform is always ready for your users.

With solid-state disks, VDI session boot times can be improved by more than 5x{{Footnote.N52185}} with throughput improvements of 3x-5x, while latency is reduced significantly over traditional spinning disks. This means VDI instances boot faster and more efficiently, ensuring users are able to log in and start working quickly.

It's About Speed, Not Capacity

VDI users don't require a lot of platform storage because user data is typically stored elsewhere. While solid-state disk storage costs more per MB compared to traditional spinning disks, the cost is significantly less in terms of cost per IOPS. Whereas a single Kingston datacenter-class SSD can deliver more than 10,000 IOPS at steady-state, a traditional spinning-disk counterpart can only deliver around 200 IOPS. To support 100 users, you need about 50 traditional spinning disks or only two datacenter-class SSDs to support the same quantity of users. SSDs provide the best performance-per-dollar over any other form of enterprise-class storage.

Guarantee VDI Scale-Up

As more desktops are added to a VDI platform, traditional spinning-disk arrays will encounter limits faster than modern SSD arrays. As your VDI platform grows, you need storage that can keep up. Traditional spinning disks will reach performance thresholds suddenly, adversely affecting all users on the platform. SSD IOPS capacity can be scaled easier to ensure that as more users are added to the platform, the storage is able to keep up.

• Increase user satisfaction and reduce adoption resistance of implementing VDI through the use of high-performance SSDs
• Reduce the cost-per-desktop of VDI by using the best cost-per-IOPS benefit of SSDs
• Improve datacenter ROI by reducing the number of VDI hosts required
• Recover from VDI host failures quickly with storage that is over 5x faster than traditional spinning disks
• Get users working to a productive state faster with quicker logon times
• Scale the platform confidently with storage that can keep up with increased user loads
• Applications load faster when hosted on SSDs, which improves the end-user’s perception of performance