FlexPod Datacenter with VMware Horizon
FlexPod® is a proven and trusted enterprise solution from NetApp and Cisco. IT leaders who need to run business-critical applications appreciate its robustness, scalability, ease of management, and hybrid cloud capabilities. In today’s digital era, customers are looking to meet all of their remote solution needs so that their workloads can function seamlessly at scale across the globe while reducing operational and capital costs and providing a superior end-user experience.
FlexPod for VDI
Our current challenging environment has resulted in a sudden increased need for employees and students to work and learn remotely. As a result, governments and corporations want to deploy new virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments or expand their existing VDI environments to provide their users with fast and secure remote access.
To meet these fast-changing needs, Cisco and NetApp, through their FlexPod partners, deliver standardized converged infrastructure for VDI. FlexPod can handle mission-critical VDI applications from hundreds to tens of thousands of users. In addition, VDI and other enterprise and cloud workloads use the same FlexPod architectural model with its industry-leading standardized components such as NetApp® AFF and FAS storage arrays, Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) servers, and Cisco Nexus switches.
Customer adoption of hybrid cloud has increased recently to get higher reliability, reduced risk, faster application response time, lower operating costs, and faster time to market. FlexPod's fundamental capabilities, reliability, performance, and efficiency with a lower TCO will help customers achieve the outcomes they are looking for with the hybrid multi-cloud deployments.
FlexPod VDI solutions support VDI users like task workers, knowledge workers, and power users for their primary VDI use cases in application migration, virtual workstations, and remote desktop shared hosts. Customers can start small with a solution to support few concurrent workers and scale up. Or they can mix and match to support their entire agency and workforce.
FlexPod for VMware horizon:
More power Same Size:
- Cisco UCS B200 M6 blade servers dual 32-core 2.0 GHz Intel Xeon (Gold 6338) Scalable Family processors with 1 TB of 3200 Mhz memory supports more virtual desktop workloads than the previously released generation processors on the same hardware.
- Intel Xeon Gold 6338 32-core scalable family processors used in this study provided a balance between increased per-server capacity and cost
Integration of Cisco Intersight with NetApp Active IQ Unified Manager for storage monitoring and orchestration
- Intersight Assist enables Intersight to securely connect to third-party devices, including ONTAP-based NetApp storage, through AIQUM, and services such as VMware vSphere. This delivers operational-level support that unifies the entire infrastructure stack.
NetApp AFF A400 array provides industry-leading storage solutions that efficiently handle the most demanding I/O bursts (for example, login storms), profile management, and user data management.
- Validation of Cisco Nexus 9000 with NetApp AFF A400 system
- Validation of Cisco MDS 9000 with NetApp AFF A400 system
- Support for the latest NetApp AFF A400 hardware and NetApp ONTAP® 9.10
Stress-tested to the limits during simulated login storms.
All Virtualized: This CVD presents a validated design that is 100 percent virtualized on VMware ESXi 7.0U2.
VMware Horizon 8 advantage
- New unified product architecture that supports both Virtual Desktops and Remote Desktop Server Hosted server sessions.
- Modular solution supports seamless delivery of Windows apps and desktops as the number of user increase
- PCoIP and Blast extreme enhancements help to optimize performance and improve the user experience
Ansible Automation Workflow and Solution Deployment
This FlexPod with vSphere 7.0 U2 and Cisco UCS M6 solution uses a management workstation (control machine) to run Ansible playbooks to configure Cisco Nexus, Cisco UCS, NetApp Storage, and Install VMware Cluster.
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