Nimble has continued to gain serious traction among customers deploying VDI. (For an analysis of why, refer to http://www.nimblestorage.com/blog/3507/.) Today, Nimble announced certification of our storage platforms through the VMware Rapid Desktop Program. What exactly does this mean?
If you are looking to deploy VDI or have already deployed VDI, you know that there is a substantial time lag between when organizations start evaluating VDI to when they have a successful deployment in place. There are multiple steps along the way starting with developing success criteria, research and evaluation, configuration and testing, and finally purchase, provisioning and deployment.
Given the number of moving parts in a VDI deployment and given the hard to predict and rapidly fluctuating workload profile characteristic of VDI, the process above could be iterative and time-consuming.
VMware launched the Rapid Desktop program, to allow customers to streamline this process and accelerate the solution sizing and selection process by providing pre-defined, proven, orderable solutions.
The test process uses the VMware View Planner tool to simulate various application workloads. Validation criteria are collected around key metrics such as application response time, CPU utilization, memory utilization, IOPS, etc.
The end product is a referenceable blueprint that can be purchased off the shelf by customers. The figure below shows an example of a smaller deployment architecture.
Sample 200-Desktop Certified Configuration
In a nutshell, this certification embodies the joint commitment and expertise of VMware and Nimble Storage to simplify VDI deployments. You can expect to see more tools and proof points from the partnership targeted at a solution approach to virtual desktops coming in the near future.
For more details, please visit https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/8396. You may also want to check out what VMware has to say about all this.
