Supercharging Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) with Nutanix Files
The world has changed in the past few months. Schools have gone virtual; doctors are practicing telemedicine, and companies such as Facebook are planning for permanent remote workers. These changes targeted to stem the growth of Covid-19 will become a part of how we live and work in the future. Unfortunately, most existing IT infrastructures are not designed to handle this massive decentralization of the workplace.
Take, for example, VPNs. Until now, most VPNs were deployed to support a fraction of the employees at a time. Going forward, it needs to support the entire remote-working workforce, and IT teams will need to add more capacity quickly. Similarly, many companies provide their employees and contractors with laptops or desktops to do their work. However, this will become increasingly difficult to support as these laptops/desktops need to be shipped back-and-forth whenever any change (fix, re-configure, or replace) is required. The issue becomes even direr when new applications need to be added, patched, or upgraded frequently.
This is where Virtual Desktops Infrastructure (VDI) comes in.
VDI enables employees to access their applications from their personal devices using a browser (check out Xi Frame) or a client-side application. It also allows IT administrators to centrally manage all the virtual desktops and user applications, making it easy to add, patch, or upgrade applications with a few clicks.
However, there is one glitch. Even though IT teams can spin up thousands of new desktops very quickly, and at a fraction of the cost, this agility is often unmatched by the aging storage infrastructure, often a relic of the past - the Big Iron storage systems. These rigid, time-consuming, and painful to deploy and manage storage systems slow down the businesses' agility and dampen IT productivity.
HOW NUTANIX FILES HELPS
Nutanix Files is a software-defined, scale-out File Server built for the cloud era. It runs as an application on the same servers as the virtual desktops and provides unparalleled simplicity, flexibility, and intelligence. For example, it takes less than 20 minutes to deploy a file server and start serving files. Further, the file server scales seamlessly with the number of desktops, i.e., growing when you need more desktops and shrinking when you need fewer. This speed and elasticity of Nutanix Files provide unparalleled business agility and productivity boost to the already overburdened IT team.
There are several other significant benefits of using Nutanix Files for VDI deployments:
1. Very fast and predictable logon performance
Logon time, the single most important KPI for user experience in any VDI deployment, depends heavily on the speed of the storage system. If the storage system is slow or provides unpredictable performance, the user experience will suffer much. Since Nutanix Files is software-defined, it can be deployed on the same servers as the Virtual Desktops, thereby avoiding multi-hop network connectivity and potential network bottlenecks, resulting in a fast and more predictable logon performance.
2. No frozen sessions or session disconnects
Virtual desktops will often experience frozen sessions or session disconnects or the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) if the storage is slow or flaky or does not support seamless upgrades. Nutanix Files is architected to provide predictable and stable storage for VDI with features such as rolling upgrades, durable file handles and soon to be released Continuously Available (CA) shares. With these features, desktops continue to operate smoothly even when the underlying infrastructure experience any issues.
3. Seamless integration with profile management solution such as Microsoft’s FSLogix and Citrix Profile Manager
Nutanix Files supports both File-based and Container-based profile management solutions. With Files-based solutions, both mandatory and roaming profiles reside on Nutanix File shares and are downloaded when users logs on and copied back only if changed while logging out. With Container-based solutions such as Citrix User and Personalization layers or FSlogix, the profiles are stored on Nutanix Files as VHDx and are mounted at login time.
4. Massive scalability
Nutanix Files supports both scale-up and scale-out. Depending on the deployment, one can either add more CPU and Memory to scale-up the File Server VMs or deploy more file server VMs for increased performance. Starting with a minimum configuration of a single File Server VM or three File Server VMs, one can go up to 16 File Server VMs and support 20,000+ virtual desktops, and all with a few clicks.
5. Highly resilient storage
Nutanix Files is built with the same web-scale technology as the Nutanix HCI platform. It leverages a purpose-built, home-grown distributed database to store the file system metadata for resiliency. Hence, if a File Server VM goes down for any reason, the shares hosted on that VM is moved to another File Server VM, keeping all the shares still accessible. Beyond this, Nutanix Files supports intelligent load balancing algorithms to identify hotspots and transfer the load to the least loaded File Server VM.
6. Comprehensive data protection
Nutanix Files comes with comprehensive data protection, starting with maintaining two or more copies of data depending on the configuration. This prevents any data loss due to drive or server failures. Files also supports local, space-efficient snapshots for self-service restore or disaster recovery.
7. Operational Simplicity
Nutanix Files is built on the “opinionated design” philosophy, which means users should have to deal with only the essentials, and the details, wherein the complexity lies, should be hidden within the storage platform. Take, for example, Sizing. Sizing is tricky, and almost always a guestimate as workloads change over time. What you assumed during purchase may not hold water a year down the line. With Nutanix Files, you can start with what you need today and can quickly expand the compute and storage separately. Even the licensing of storage is based on 1TB granularity to support this “Byte-sized Infrastructure.”
Another aspect is managing the storage silos – one for VDI desktops and another for User Profiles, Home Directories, and Department Shares. With the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, both the VDI desktops and the user storage can be on the same platform and managed using the same Prism console, resulting in significant management and operational simplicity and reduced Total Cost of Ownership.
8. Data and not Storage
Unlike other storage-only solutions, Nutanix Files is a data management platform. It provides invaluable insights into data usage, patterns of files access, user behavior, and anomaly detection.
For example, File Analytics can detect anomalous user behavior such as mass deletion of files by a rogue user and will soon provide the ability to take actions such as blocking the user from deleting more files. Similarly, File Analytics also provides detailed reports of all activities performed on a file by a specific or all users. For more information, please check out this blog.
In Summary, building VDI with Nutanix Files increases business agility, reduces operational complexity, and provides deep insights into data and users. If you want to learn more about Nutanix Files, please visit https://www.nutanix.com/products/files.
Related products:
- Xi Frame – Nutanix’s cloud-based desktop-as-a-service
- Nutanix Objects - Nutanix's Object Store