Rethinking VDI With Hive Fabric

Greg Dietrich, Global SE Lead

Over the last year, I’ve visited many of our global customers. These included organizations in education, healthcare, financial services, federal sectors, as well as Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Value-Added Resellers (VARs).

Our conversations often focus on their IT systems and services. Many struggle to meet business goals; technology often works against them, not for them. What I find particularly interesting is the alignment of overarching goals, from system administrators to directors and even executive management. They all want more simplicity. This applies to their IT architecture, costs, and operations. Technology teams desire the ability to deliver solutions to end-users quickly and simply. These teams want to focus on innovating for their business, not managing and supporting complex infrastructure.

One common IT infrastructure area still perceived as highly complex and expensive is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). It’s often fraught with frequent architectural and software version changes. Traditionally, it required multiple vendors and layers to operate. Yet, if done effectively, VDI can bring significant value to organizations. This includes centralizing desktop management, reducing administrative overhead, and improving an organization’s security.

The Complexity of Traditional VDI Solutions

Regardless of whether the platform is based on Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) or a 3-tiered architecture (compute, networking, and storage), the current VDI story often suffers from complexity. It’s plagued with layer upon layer of different solutions. This leads to proliferating management layers and associated management hardware.

Below are some well-known Reference Architecture diagrams from legacy VDI vendors. They highlight the additional management system(s) or application(s) required to manage the “simple” orchestration of VDI (outlined in yellow).

Figure 1: VMware Workspace One and VMware Horizon 7 Enterprise Edition On-Premises Reference Architecture

Figure 2: Xendesktop Deployment Blueprint Reference Architecture

With the overwhelming demand for a different approach, vendors are scrambling. They try to consolidate parts of their solution into the cloud. This gives the impression of a less complex architecture. However, this has merely moved operations into the vendor layer. It brings additional costs and the risk of outsourcing key infrastructure to an unknown team.

Hive Fabric: Your All-in-One, Simplified Virtualization Solution

Hive Fabric provides virtual desktops, virtual servers, and virtual storage. It delivers all the benefits of an Intelligent Virtualization solution. This comes from a single vendor, in a single install. The Hive Fabric Message Bus provides the foundation for an intelligent datacenter. It efficiently binds the successful integration of the hypervisor, VM orchestration, provisioning, brokering, cluster load balancing, user profile management, storage acceleration, and hyperconvergence, as well as access gateway. Hive Fabric allows customers to deliver virtualization without multiple deployments of management applications, VMs, servers, or appliances. The Message Bus provides Hive Fabric with a peer-to-peer relationship. This allows complete system management from any host within the cluster. This is the core of Hive Fabric VDI‘s simplicity.

At HiveIO, we have the advantage of developing Hive Fabric as a virtualization solution from the ground up. We had no need to bolt on other applications or code, unlike legacy providers over nearly a decade. The result is a simplified approach to operations and deployment of virtual desktops, virtual servers, and virtual storage. Hive Fabric orchestrates multiple open-source components to make it all possible. Below is a reference architecture outlining how Hive Fabric interacts with the Message Bus, and identifies the single management interface (outlined in yellow).

Figure 3: Hive Fabric Reference Architecture

Why Hive Fabric VDI is the Future of Virtualization

With architectures, software versions, and technology rapidly evolving, businesses are demanding single vendor solutions. They want these to address their requirements rather than building their own solution with multiple products from different vendors.

Hive Fabric is empowering the IT Generalist. Its all-inclusive platform manages operations across all datacenter virtualization needs, including VDI, VSI, and storage.

Hive Fabric is uniquely poised to challenge the status quo. This status quo has existed so long within the virtualization industry. It provides an alternative to previously complex and expensive virtual desktop and virtual server architectures.

At HiveIO, we don’t want you to stand in line. We don’t want you to get certified. Re-use your existing infrastructure, deploy commodity servers, and simplify your day-to-day. We want you to spend your time on your business, not on your infrastructure.