A quick VMware Horizon VDI POC
For one of our prospects, we set up a VMware Horizon VDI “POC”.
VMware Horizon is a Desktop Virtualization solution.
In other words, your super powerful, bulky and noisy 3D PC is hosted on a server in a computer room, while you access it with a full experience from a miniature computer attached to the back of your super screens in your “loungy” – and silent – office. Another benefit is to be able to time share this server to multiple other people office, while using another “more normal” virtual desktop for the daily business.
Setup Description
This setup consisted of VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V hosts, a full-size Active Directory setup, SQL server and the various Horizon Components for a limited demo installation, like “View Composer”, “Connections Servers” and of course a set of virtual Windows 10 machine and templates. I couldn’t test a 3D NVidia accelerator as the price tag is out of reach of such an experiment, but PassMark benchmarks showed the efficiency of the virtual desktop CPU’s and memory. The rest would be proportional to the outfitting of a real-life hardware servers and the accelerator components of VMware Horizon. (SSD arrays, vSan, Nvidia shared Grid vPC and vAPPs accelerators etc).
Profitability – Break Even Setup Size
Of course, there is a proportional price tag, a bit a like BMW car option list. But scalability and optimized sharing of the GPU will probably make this solution interesting when you go above the 10 users. The typical target would be small (and bigger) GPU related activities like prototyping, architecture, statistical or math modelling willing to share GPU resources to its collaborators.
Benefits
This kind of experiments piles up to our management, consulting and support skills, bringing us the in-depth knowledgeability of the latest technologies that our clients are expecting from us when helping them.
*All Microsoft and VMware Brands and Product Names are copyrighted and, or registered. We have no endorsement or specific relationship with any of these companies beside using their legal context for testing and appreciating their product.
