VDI Options - Modernization
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Hi folks,
We are currently using Citrix for our VDI (Citrix Virtual Desktops) and Citrix Storefront to present Desktops to end users. This solution is around 5-7 years old, depending on the specific hardware, and we are now due to replace this in 2022.
I am writing this post to get a list of suggestions that we can research as alternatives to the existing stack. Some hardware is newer as the stack was added to over time for expansion. The whole solution needs to be replaced for a range of business reasons and also grown due to business growth.
Current Environment:
VDI: Citrix NetScaler <- Citrix Storefront <- Citrix XenDesktop/Citrix Virtual Desktops
Underline Hypervisor: VMWare ESXi
Physical: 20 Dell servers (a mix of blades enclosures running MX740c, several R630s, several R640s and several R730
Total: 312 physical cores, 7.4TB RAM.
Storage: Nimble iSCSI SANs total of around 1PB (although this is a mix of VDI and non-VDI data)
This supports around 700 users.
Guests: Windows 10 Desktops, internal only - not customer facing but high levels of uptime required as we are global and users are working somewhere on this system at all times. 4x9+Age: depending on item, 5-7 years.
Note: pyramid of doom!I would like to move this to a modern solution and get away from multiple servers sitting on top of a non redundant SAN.
One solution I am particularly interested in is Dell VXRail for VDI using VMWare Horizon. The VXRail is the Dell HCI solution and would enable us to scale up as needed and make use of VMWare vSAN to protect against any one host failure. Possibly more than one host depending on configuration. Virtual desktops would sit on the vSAN for storage so each desktop is HA, but we would move shares on a different stack. Perhaps something like a Dell VMAX/PowerMax which are 6x9 or so anyway.
Another option is to still stick to the whole Citrix ecosystem. Yet again, another option could be Azure VDI.
What would you suggest we look at?
Thank you,
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What I've seen large corporations do is to retire their VDI solutions and find other ways to fulfill whatever they were trying to accomplish with VDI.
So it makes sense asking what your trying to accomplish with VDI and looking at other ways to accomplish it.
Any centralized solution will have limited scalability by it's very nature of being centralized. That goes for your VDI solution too.
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@pete-s said in VDI Options - Modernization:
What I've seen large corporations do is to retire their VDI solutions and find other ways to fulfill whatever they were trying to accomplish with VDI.
So it makes sense asking what your trying to accomplish with VDI and looking at other ways to accomplish it.
Any centralized solution will have limited scalability by it's very nature of being centralized. That goes for your VDI solution too.
Interesting. Do you have any specific examples?
The VDI solution actually does what we need and has for a long time, we are just at the point where we need to replace the stack as its in our replacement window. 5-7 years old is not something we wish to keep. Plus, if doing a replacement we should look at other technologies (including no VDI if you have any specifics?)
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I'm assuming to provide specifics we'd need an idea of that the workloads are on your VDI infrastructure.
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What about moving to Azure Remote Desktop? or Windows 365? Have MS deal with all the back end - you never have to worry about the hardware stack again. Plus you move from CapX to OpX.
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@jimmy9008 Azure virtual Desktop is decent. A bunch of other contenders didn't pan out and is the only one that hit the most important points in practice.
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@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
I am writing this post to get a list of suggestions that we can research as alternatives to the existing stack. Some hardware is newer as the stack was added to over time for expansion. The whole solution needs to be replaced for a range of business reasons and also grown due to business growth.
VDI was always a stop gap for organizations that had to stay on legacy systems and couldn't modernize their apps. Typically the idea is that one generation of VDI is all that you will ever do because, in theory, it was never a good idea. VDI came about after the need for VDI should have not existed. That's why we said when VDI was new that Microsoft was charging an arm and a leg for licensing for VDI.... because anyone that wasn't trapped on bad software had no need (or value) from it. VDI licensing was part of the punishment for not staying current.
Do you still have a need for VDI? Do you have a plan to be done with it soon? Can you just retire it and be done with it?
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@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
@pete-s said in VDI Options - Modernization:
What I've seen large corporations do is to retire their VDI solutions and find other ways to fulfill whatever they were trying to accomplish with VDI.
So it makes sense asking what your trying to accomplish with VDI and looking at other ways to accomplish it.
Any centralized solution will have limited scalability by it's very nature of being centralized. That goes for your VDI solution too.
Interesting. Do you have any specific examples?
The VDI solution actually does what we need and has for a long time, we are just at the point where we need to replace the stack as its in our replacement window. 5-7 years old is not something we wish to keep. Plus, if doing a replacement we should look at other technologies (including no VDI if you have any specifics?)
Yes, if you are on legacy apps that aren't up to twenty years ago standards, VDI often meets that need very well. But VDI is slow, cumbersome, expensive, and unnecessarily risky. It's a bit weird that your organization is concerned about a five year old VDI solution, but not worried about workloads that are assumed to be ancient and unmaintained (or poorly maintained.)
The examples of moving away from VDI are everywhere... basically every business that moves to modern software has zero value to VDI, those that don't often want it.
In veterinary we can use this example a lot. Ancient software is the mainstay in the industry - almost every clinic using the market leaders (all of which are unmaintained for 25+ years, many over 30) use VDI to make the software work better, more securely and be available remotely. But it adds a lot of cost to already costly and risky solutions.
Any clinic running anything remotely modern thinks this is crazy, Because all the modern clinical apps are web based, have zero need for Windows at all, let alone VDI, and can naturally be accessed from anywhere and are vastly more secure.
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I get what ya'll are saying but thats just not how it is here. My options are replace what is there with new, or keep what is there and let it grow older.
I'll keep looking at options on my own, but thanks folks.
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@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
I get what ya'll are saying but thats just not how it is here. My options are replace what is there with new, or keep what is there and let it grow older.
I'll keep looking at options on my own, but thanks folks.
I'm lost - why are you bailing on this thread because one person said VDI is not how you should be moving forward? Other options were presented.
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@dashrender said in VDI Options - Modernization:
@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
I get what ya'll are saying but thats just not how it is here. My options are replace what is there with new, or keep what is there and let it grow older.
I'll keep looking at options on my own, but thanks folks.
I'm lost - why are you bailing on this thread because one person said VDI is not how you should be moving forward? Other options were presented.
I don't see value in discussing why we have a VDI. The fact is we do and that will not be changing. Being told 'grumble grumble' that is not how to do it 'grumble grumble' is of no help to me. Regardless of what it does, VDI is staying. My options are keep the old stuff and hope it works for another 5 years until the next cycle, or use the budget I have to replace it for a new VDI stack. The project is not to asses the needs of requiring VDI, but to replace the VDI with a new VDI.
Most of the comments on the thread do not help with that so I gave up with it. Sure, if the project was 'get rid of VD' - but its not.
Somebody suggested Azure VDI, will take a look at that and keep looking at other options.
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@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
Somebody suggested Azure VDI, will take a look at that and keep looking at other options.
yep - that was me.
M365 Business Premium also includes some type of VDI - though I haven't dug into it so I don't know the details.
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@dashrender said in VDI Options - Modernization:
@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
Somebody suggested Azure VDI, will take a look at that and keep looking at other options.
yep - that was me.
M365 Business Premium also includes some type of VDI - though I haven't dug into it so I don't know the details.
Thank you, will take a look. I was hoping for things like this, thank you.
I was hoping for lots of comments with options like this, or other vendors, or to be told - hey, Citrix is still a great option, or any interesting VDI platforms to look at. Not, hey, don't do that project you do have, and do this other one instead. The reality is my project is replace VDI with VDI. Not, remove VDI.
Either way, thank you all.
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@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
I get what ya'll are saying but thats just not how it is here. My options are replace what is there with new, or keep what is there and let it grow older.
I'll keep looking at options on my own, but thanks folks.
If you just want to buy a solution without doing your homework to figure out what's right for the business, just get new servers and keep paying the crazy license fees for VMWare/Citrix (I'm assuming you've got the HA VMWare license.)
Without knowing what apps are running in the VDI, all we can do is generalize.
Are you stuck with VMWare and/or Citrix because of management? Big cost savings in moving away from those, even if you keep paying for support IE: Scale or Starwind
More details would be needed to make any solid recommendations.
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@travisdh1 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
I get what ya'll are saying but thats just not how it is here. My options are replace what is there with new, or keep what is there and let it grow older.
I'll keep looking at options on my own, but thanks folks.
If you just want to buy a solution without doing your homework to figure out what's right for the business, just get new servers and keep paying the crazy license fees for VMWare/Citrix (I'm assuming you've got the HA VMWare license.)
Without knowing what apps are running in the VDI, all we can do is generalize.
Are you stuck with VMWare and/or Citrix because of management? Big cost savings in moving away from those, even if you keep paying for support IE: Scale or Starwind
More details would be needed to make any solid recommendations.
It doesn't sound like he's in charge. Those in charge have already told him what to do - upgrade the current solution without changing the principal of the solution.
So while we could keep beating a dead horse here - that will go on deaf ears.
The reality is there is little to no presence of anyone using VDI on these forums - so there's no one here to make any recommendations to such.
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@travisdh1 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
I get what ya'll are saying but thats just not how it is here. My options are replace what is there with new, or keep what is there and let it grow older.
I'll keep looking at options on my own, but thanks folks.
If you just want to buy a solution without doing your homework to figure out what's right for the business, just get new servers and keep paying the crazy license fees for VMWare/Citrix (I'm assuming you've got the HA VMWare license.)
Without knowing what apps are running in the VDI, all we can do is generalize.
Are you stuck with VMWare and/or Citrix because of management? Big cost savings in moving away from those, even if you keep paying for support IE: Scale or Starwind
More details would be needed to make any solid recommendations.
I am more than capable of being able to appraise solutions to meet our business needs. My question was asking for a list of solutions "What would you suggest we look at?", not to be told to not look at VDI as its wrong. I'll decide that. I was hoping the community could point me to solutions, vendors, resources which you have used and had experience of. I see the people on here as experienced so wanted to ask here, I should have just looked at g2.
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@dashrender said in VDI Options - Modernization:
@travisdh1 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
@jimmy9008 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
I get what ya'll are saying but thats just not how it is here. My options are replace what is there with new, or keep what is there and let it grow older.
I'll keep looking at options on my own, but thanks folks.
If you just want to buy a solution without doing your homework to figure out what's right for the business, just get new servers and keep paying the crazy license fees for VMWare/Citrix (I'm assuming you've got the HA VMWare license.)
Without knowing what apps are running in the VDI, all we can do is generalize.
Are you stuck with VMWare and/or Citrix because of management? Big cost savings in moving away from those, even if you keep paying for support IE: Scale or Starwind
More details would be needed to make any solid recommendations.
It doesn't sound like he's in charge. Those in charge have already told him what to do - upgrade the current solution without changing the principal of the solution.
So while we could keep beating a dead horse here - that will go on deaf ears.
The reality is there is little to no presence of anyone using VDI on these forums - so there's no one here to make any recommendations to such.
That makes sense, thank you.
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@jimmy9008 We have a use case involving a legacy client/server app that we've determined we're going to have to go VDI for in order to secure it. One lousy app for approx 5 users that I hope we eventually move away from. We are currently reviewing Azure VDI for this and it so far will fit the bill though we had to go throught a lot of "hoops" to configure networking, VPN back into our infrastructure, etc. We have not yet presented budget numbers to the bean counters but Im hoping when we do they will see the $$$$$ wasted for 5 users and will force them to a new product.
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@jt1001001 said in VDI Options - Modernization:
@jimmy9008 We have a use case involving a legacy client/server app that we've determined we're going to have to go VDI for in order to secure it. One lousy app for approx 5 users that I hope we eventually move away from. We are currently reviewing Azure VDI for this and it so far will fit the bill though we had to go throught a lot of "hoops" to configure networking, VPN back into our infrastructure, etc. We have not yet presented budget numbers to the bean counters but Im hoping when we do they will see the $$$$$ wasted for 5 users and will force them to a new product.
What other products do you plan to look at? Still VDI or something else? Any experience of VMWare Horizon?
We have around 600 - 1000 users globally (mostly developers) on the VDI I need to replace. The company dictates that the VDI must be in the same datacenter as the rest of the developers environments, so I don't think Azure VDI would work for us because of that mandate.
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Just had a very quick look at Azure Virtual Desktop and the calculator for 3 years up-front shows around 1.5m usd. Were looing upper limit of 1m usd, which would cover us for the next 5-7 years, making Azure look expensive.
