Post VMworld Thoughts: Appliances vs the Rapid Desktop Program

I don’t hide the fact that I’m a huge fan of appliances and that I’m opposed to traditional desktop virtualization architectures. I know all about pod/block design and have designed many solutions using the pod/block principle, but just because I have to use something doesn’t mean I want to. Block designs can be used to scale to the tens of thousands but they are very expensive. The top reason I don’t like this architecture is that you are basically buying a bucket of IOPS, the larger the purchase the bigger the bucket, but no matter what that bucket will fill up, then you need to buy another big bucket. For larger systems these are seven figure purchases and I just find the entire premise complete nonsense.

Pod/Block is a design principle where you buy storage, compute and networking, then mirror it until you have enough of it to cover your user count. The problem is you tend to scale in 500 or 1000 chunks. The appliance approach is completely different. First off, appliance embrace storage and compute happening in the same box. Second, it scales at much smaller chunks 100-200 users. This approach means I’m not buying a big bucket of IOPS for 1000 users, I’m utilzing local storage which tends to be faster (running on the same bus) cheaper (don’t need expensive SAN HDs) and scales better (every time I add an appliance I’m getting more IOPS). The appliance approach in one sense is still pod/block as its still storage/compute/network but it all happens within the singular appliance. The big catch though is that when you add an additional appliance you aren’t adding another separate bucket, you are increasing the size of your original bucket. This means every time you add an appliance EVERY user is affected positively.

To learn more and to read the entire article at its source, please refer to the following page, Post VMworld Thoughts: Appliances vs the Rapid Desktop Program- Gartner