Partner Content In any VDI deployment, storage is crucial for success and user experience. It ensures performance and responsiveness while supporting scalability and reliability. Storage bottlenecks can undermine the best VDI strategies, especially during peak times like boot storms and login surges. Consequently, storage choices are central to VDI design discussions, with organizations typically selecting between a traditional virtual SAN (vSAN) or an external all-flash array (AFA).
While a vSAN may appear to be the more cost-effective option — especially in VDI environments where per-desktop economics are critical — many organizations are forced to abandon it. Traditional vSAN implementations often fall short in real-world VDI scenarios, struggling with high I/O demands during boot storms, and they lack the flexibility required to deliver their promised price advantage. vSAN’s layered architecture introduces latency, reduces responsiveness, and lacks the efficiency for consistent user experiences. As a result, IT teams often resort to dedicated all-flash arrays to overcome these limitations despite the added cost and infrastructure complexity. Though this approach addresses the performance gap, it creates new challenges in management, scalability, and long-term cost control.
The cost problem with external all-flash arrays
Traditional external all-flash arrays, though powerful, are typically costly and often become a significant portion of the overall VDI budget. Beyond the initial purchase, this expense also encompasses ongoing support contracts, expansion shelves, and frequent hardware upgrades to maintain performance.
For VDI deployments, where storage performance can make or break the user experience, IT often finds itself buying expensive storage equipment designed to handle infrequent peak loads. Consequently, organizations overspend on storage resources.
Complexity and separate infrastructure management
External all-flash arrays demand their own management expertise, separate from the rest of the VDI environment. Storage admins must manage the arrays, monitor performance, troubleshoot bottlenecks, and tune storage configurations independently from the virtualization and application layers. This creates operational silos and complicates VDI management.
Every change to the external array—whether an upgrade, firmware update, or configuration adjustment—requires coordination across storage, virtualization, and networking teams. The result is longer downtime, an increased risk of misconfigurations, and more frequent user disruptions.
Lack of VM and application awareness
A critical shortcoming of external arrays in VDI environments is their lack of direct integration and visibility into the virtual machines they support. Without VM-level awareness, these storage systems cannot automatically optimize storage resources based on real-time application and desktop needs. Instead, IT administrators must manually tune performance, which is complex, time-consuming, and reactive rather than proactive.
For example, external arrays do not automatically understand how to distribute resources best to prevent bottlenecks during boot storms or login events. Administrators must continuously monitor and adjust storage policies manually, resulting in inefficiencies and a higher potential for performance degradation.
Vendor lock-in risks
Investing heavily in external all-flash storage arrays often leads to vendor lock-in. Each vendor uses proprietary technologies and unique management interfaces. Consequently, IT teams become heavily dependent on a single vendor, limiting flexibility and reducing negotiating power for future expansions or upgrades.
As storage requirements grow or evolve, organizations face substantial hardware refresh costs or forced upgrades to maintain compatibility and performance. This situation limits an organization’s ability to adapt quickly to new requirements or take advantage of more cost-effective storage technologies as they become available.
Next-generation vSAN: A better alternative
A next-generation vSAN eliminates many drawbacks of external all-flash arrays. A modern vSAN architecture:
• Delivers High Performance: A next-generation vSAN integrates storage services directly into the hypervisor, eliminating unnecessary software layers and reducing I/O latency. This streamlined architecture increases efficiency, eliminates boot storm concerns, and delivers performance that rivals—and sometimes exceeds—external all-flash arrays.
• Reduces Costs: By using internal storage and supporting a wide range of industry-standard flash drives across multiple vendors, a next-generation vSAN enables organizations to avoid expensive, proprietary hardware. This flexibility allows IT teams to deploy high-performance storage at a fraction of the cost, often reducing capital and operational expenses by up to 10x.
• Simplifies Management: Integrated storage eliminates the need for separate infrastructure and specialized storage skills. Administrators manage the system from within the virtualization console, streamlining operations and allowing them to seamlessly manage VDI storage alongside their other virtualization tasks.
• Provides VM-level Awareness: Because a next-generation vSAN operates at the hypervisor layer, it inherently understands VM workloads. This awareness enables automatic resource allocation, proactive performance optimization, and rapid response to changing demands, improving the user experience during boot storms or peak usage periods.
• Avoids Vendor Lock-in: Using commodity hardware and integrated storage software, organizations gain flexibility in their hardware purchasing decisions. They can select best-of-breed components based on cost, performance, and support without being locked into a single vendor's proprietary ecosystem.
• Enhances Scalability: Expanding storage is as simple as adding additional standard servers with internal drives, allowing organizations to scale incrementally and cost-effectively without the significant capital investments required by external arrays.
Conclusion
While external all-flash arrays can deliver performance for VDI, they come with high costs, increased complexity, vendor lock-in risks, and a lack of VM-level optimization. A next-generation vSAN solution integrated into the virtualization layer addresses these issues head-on, providing a simplified, cost-effective, scalable, and VM-aware storage solution ideal for modern VDI deployments.
VergeOS is one example of a next-generation vSAN approach. It integrates storage directly into the hypervisor, delivers VM-level performance insights, and scales using standard hardware without needing separate storage infrastructure. Organizations looking to maximize their VDI investment should strongly consider a next-generation vSAN strategy like VergeOS to reduce cost and complexity while improving performance and resiliency.
If you are looking for an alternative to VMware or Citrix, watch VergeIO’s on-demand webinar: Exploring VDI Alternatives.
Partner content provided by VergeIO.
