Today we would like to talk a little about VDI. In particular, about what sometimes creates a significant choice problem for the top management of large companies: which option to prefer - to organize a local solution on their own or subscribe to a service within a public cloud? When the bill goes not to hundreds, but to thousands of employees, it is especially important to choose the optimal solution, since everything can turn into both impressive additional costs and serious savings.
Unfortunately, there is never a universal answer: each company needs to “try on” each option for itself and calculate it in detail. But as a possible help, we will share interesting analytics from the Evaluator Group. The company's specialists have been engaged in research in the areas of information management, data storage and protection, infrastructure IT solutions and modern data centers for more than 20 years. In a recently published study, they compared the cost of a local VDI solution based on with a public cloud subscription to Amazon WorkSpaces and evaluated the cost-effectiveness of both options over a three-year perspective. And we translated it all especially for you.
At one point, it was thought that the cloud would be the inevitable successor to traditional IT infrastructure. Gmail, Dropbox and many other cloud services have become commonplace. As companies began to actively use public clouds, the concept of the cloud itself has evolved. Instead of “only clouds”, a “hybrid cloud” has appeared, and more and more corporations are using this model. In general, businesses believe that the public cloud is well suited to work with certain data and application sets, while on-premises infrastructure is better suited for others.
The overall appeal of a public cloud and whether it is right for a particular organization depends on several factors. Among them are the availability of IT staff and the level of their expertise, concerns about the level of control, data protection and security in general, the company's preferences regarding financing (we are talking about fixed and variable costs) and, of course, the cost of a turnkey solution. According to another Evaluator Group study (Hybrid Cloud Storage for the Enterprise), security and cost were the key factors of choice for respondents.
Like other applications running in the data center, VDI is available as a service from various public cloud providers. For enterprises choosing public cloud for VDI, price is an important decision-making factor. This study compares the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of an on-premises VDI solution with VDI running in a public cloud. Specifically, these solutions are the Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 system with VMware Horizon and WorkSpaces in the Amazon cloud.
TCO Model
Total cost of ownership is a concept commonly used when evaluating IT equipment purchases. TCO takes into account not only the cost of acquisition, but also the costs of deploying and operating the selected equipment. Converged infrastructures such as the Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 have simplified the traditional environment to reduce design, acquisition and ongoing maintenance costs. In addition, VMware Horizon simplifies operational aspects by tightly integrating with the rest of the VMware product ecosystem that has become ubiquitous in enterprise IT today.
This solution will consider two different user profiles for the Dell EMC VxBlock 1000. The first one - Knowledge Worker - is, in fact, designed for normal office work scenarios without increased requirements for computing resources. The second - Power Worker - is suitable for workers who require more intensive computing. In AWS WorkSpaces, they can be mapped to Standard Bundle and Performance Bundle, respectively.
VDI Configurations for User Profiles
Local infrastructure
The Dell EMC VxBlock converged system includes Dell EMC storage, CISCO UCS server and networking solutions, and the VMware Horizon VDI software platform. For on-premises infrastructure, the VMware Horizon software stack was deployed on standard x86 servers that scale based on the number of users. Storage capacity for software and user accounts is provided by flash storage arrays connected using a Fiber Channel SAN. The infrastructure was managed using Dell EMC AMP, a standard VxBlock component responsible for managing, monitoring and automating the system.
The architecture of the described infrastructure can be seen in the diagram below. This solution was originally designed for a 2500 virtual desktop environment and can scale up to a limit of 50 desktops by adding new components within the same design. This study is based on an infrastructure that includes 000 virtual desktops.
Architectural Design Dell EMC VxBlock 1000
On-premise VDI Infrastructure Components
- Cisco UCS C240 M5 (2U) - two Intel Xeon Gold 6138 2 GHz, Cisco Network Assistant, 768 GB memory for Power Worker profiles and 576 GB memory for Knowledge Worker profiles. An external flash array connected via SAN acted as a storage for user data.
- Cisco UCS C220 M5 SX (1U) - two Intel Xeon Silver 4114 2,2 GHz, CNA and 192 GB of memory. These servers support the Dell EMC Advanced Manager platform and share storage provided by the Dell EMC Unity scale-out system.
- Cisco Nexus 2232PP (1U) - Switch with 32 ports, FCoE 10 Gb / s. Provides sufficient access for environments with a large number of servers.
- The Cisco Nexus 9300 (1U) is a 36-port switch that provides connectivity to the end user's IP network.
- Cisco Nexus 6454 (1U) - Servers that provide converged network connectivity for compute servers, IP network, and Fiber Channel network.
- The Cisco 31108EC (1U) is a 48-port, 10/100 Gb Ethernet switch that provides connectivity between AMP servers and storage, as well as the rest of the converged infrastructure.
- The Cisco MDS 9396S (2U) is a 48-port Fiber Channel switch that provides SAN connectivity for XtremIO X2 arrays.
- Dell EMC XtremIO X2 (5U) Dual Active Controller Flash Array consists of 18 x 4TB SSD. Enable custom desktops and VDI software.
- Dell EMC Unity 300 (2U) is a hybrid storage array with 400/600 GB SSD and 10K HDD. Provides capabilities to support AMP fabric management software.
- VMware Horizon is a virtualization software platform for managing virtual desktops in enterprise environments. The vSphere hypervisor is licensed as part of VMware Horizon.
This study used simple three-year depreciation without interest to estimate TCO. It is assumed that organizations that wish to assess the feasibility of purchasing such equipment can easily add the cost of leasing or capital from internal sources into the calculations.
The maintenance cost was estimated at $2000 for 42U per month, and includes the cost of power, cooling, and rack space. It has been estimated that each server requires 0,2 hours per week to administer. Each storage system will require an hour per week for upgrades and maintenance. Hourly pay for admin time was calculated using the following formula: "Hourly pay for full time IT administrator time per year ($150) / 000 work hours per year."
Total cost of ownership calculation
Despite the fact that the system consists of a fairly large number of different components, cost calculations in practice turn out to be quite simple. An environment designed for 5000 users of the Knowledge Worker profile was taken as an example. The same methodology was applied to obtain the comparative cost on the charts that will be shown below. These software, hardware, and support costs, including standard discounting, have been totaled together with hardware and administrative costs over a 3-year holding period.
VDI infrastructure costs for 5000 Knowledge Workers:
- Servers (computing and management) - $1
- Data storage (VDI system, user data, management system) – $315
- Networks (LAN and SAN switches, as well as other equipment) – $253
- Software (VDI platform, management, linked to the hardware part of the license) – $2
- Support (maintenance and software and hardware updates) – $224
- Services (deployment of hardware and software) – $78
- Maintenance costs for 3 years: $226
- Administrative expenses for 3 years: $161
- In total: $5
If the total cost of virtual desktops is divided by 5000 employees and then divided by 36 months, the result is a price of $28,52 per month per Knowledge Worker profile user.
Public cloud infrastructure
Amazon WorkSpaces is a VDI as a Service offering that runs everything inside the AWS Cloud. Both Windows and Linux desktops are available and billing can be monthly or hourly. At the time of the study, 5 base packages were offered with different system configurations, from 1 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM to 8 vCPUs and 32 GB of RAM plus storage. Two configurations with Linux desktops were chosen as the basis for this TCO comparison. This price is also valid under the Bring Your Own concept for Windows licensing. The fact is that many companies already have large long-term enterprise licensing agreements with Microsoft (ELA - Enterprise Licensing Agreement).
- Standard Package: 2vCPU, 4 GB RAM per desktop, 80 GB root volume, and 10 GB per user volume for Knowledge Worker scenario - $30,83 per month.
- Performance Pack: 2vCPU, 7,5 GB RAM per desktop, 80 GB root volume, and 10 GB user volume for Power Worker scenario – $53,91 per month.
Both packages include root (80 GB for the operating system and related files) and user (10 GB for employee data) volumes. Let's assume there won't be any disruption, but keep in mind that Amazon charges for every gigabyte used over the limit. In addition, the prices shown do not include the cost of data transfer over the Internet from AWS, nor the cost of the Internet for users. For ease of calculation, the calculation model in this study assumes that there are no costs for the transmission of incoming and outgoing data.
The pricing plans above do not include system training, but they do include AWS Business Support. While the cost per user above is fixed, the cost of such support varies from about 7% per user for a pool of 2500 users to about 3% per user for a pool of 50 users. This has been taken into account in the calculations.
Let's also add that this is an on-demand pricing model with no validity period. There is no way to prepay more than the upfront payment, and there are no long-term subscriptions, in which the cost usually decreases as the term increases. In addition, for ease of calculation, this TCO model does not take into account short-term discounts and other promotional offers. However, within this comparison, their influence was in any case insignificant.
The results
Knowledge Worker Profile
The graph below shows that the starting cost of a Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 on-premises solution for VDI will cost the company about the same amount as the AWS WorkSpaces cloud solution, provided that the user pool does not exceed 2500 people. But things are changing as the number of virtual desktops increases. For a company with 5000 users, VxBlock is already about 7% cheaper, and for an enterprise that needs to deploy 20 virtual desktops, VxBlock saves more than 000% compared to the AWS cloud.
Cost comparison of VDI solutions based on VxBlock and AWS WorkSpaces for the Knowledge Worker profile, price per virtual desktop per month
Power worker profile
The following graph compares the TCO for a Power Worker profile in VxBlock-based on-premises VDI with the AWS WorkSpaces Performance package. Recall that here, unlike the Knowledge Worker profile, there are also differences in the hardware: 4 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory in VxBlock and 2 vCPUs with 7,5 GB of memory in AWS. Here, the VxBlock solution turns out to be noticeably more profitable even within a pool of 2500 users, and in general, the savings reach 30-45%.
Cost comparison of VDI solutions based on VxBlock and AWS WorkSpaces for the Power Worker profile, price per virtual desktop per month
3 year perspective
In addition to the average cost per user, it is also extremely important for corporations to evaluate the savings from selected infrastructure solutions over several years. The final graph shows how the difference in total cost of ownership over 36 months has an impressive cumulative economic impact. In the Power Worker scenario for 10 virtual desktops, the AWS solution is about $000 million more expensive than the VxBlock solution. In the Knowledge Worker scenario, over the same time period, for the same number of users, the cumulative savings are up to $8,5 million.
Cumulative cost of maintaining 10 virtual desktops on VxBlock-based on-premise infrastructure and AWS WorkSpaces public cloud for 000 Power Worker profile users
Why is the cost of a local VDI solution lower?
The cost savings for an on-premises VDI solution in the graphs above reflects two fundamental principles: economies of scale and resource maximization. As with the acquisition of any other infrastructure, there is an upfront cost to building the system in this enterprise computing environment. As the initial costs are expanded and distributed to more users, the incremental costs decrease. VDI also optimizes resource usage, in this case by controlling the allocation of CPU cores. The abstraction of data, computing, and networks allows these systems to “resubscribe” physical resources to specific ratios and thus reduce user costs. Large environments such as the public cloud use many of the same cost savings principles, but they don't return those savings to their users.
What about a 5-year tenure?
Indeed, many organizations support IT systems for longer than 3 years: often the term reaches 4-5 years. The Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 system is built with an architecture that allows you to upgrade individual components or upgrade existing ones without having to jump to a completely new system.
If the fixed and variable costs from this model are expressed over a 5-year time frame, they will decrease by about 37% (excluding two additional years of administration and support). And as a result, a local VDI solution based on Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 for 5000 Knowledge Workers would cost $28,52 per user instead of $17,98. For 5000 Power Workers, the cost would drop from $34,38 to $21,66 per user. At the same time, with a fixed price of the AWS WorkSpaces cloud solution, its cost over a 5-year period of time would remain unchanged.
User experience and risk
VDI is a mission-critical application that impacts every employee and provides access to the highest levels of the company. When replacing an employee's own desktop with VDI (whether cloud or on-premises), the user experience must be the same, so it's critical to assess the potential risks. Keeping the VDI system in place provides a greater level of control over the infrastructure and can potentially mitigate these risks.
By relying on the connectivity and bandwidth of the public internet for cloud desktop services, you can add another layer of risk to your environment. In addition, employees frequently use USB storage devices and peripherals, many of which are not supported by AWS WorkSpaces.
In what situations is a public cloud best suited?
AWS WorkSpaces is priced by number of users per month or by month. This can be handy when running short-term applications, or when it comes to development and you need to implement everything as soon as possible. In addition, this option may be attractive to companies that do not have deep IT expertise or the desire and ability to take on capital expenditures. And while VDI in the public cloud is suitable for small and medium enterprises, as well as short-term applications, for tasks related to core IT services such as desktop virtualization in large enterprises, this option may no longer be entirely suitable.
Summary and Conclusion
VDI is a technology that moves computing applications and user infrastructure from the desktop to the data center. In a way, it provides some "cloud" benefits by unifying desktop management and resources on dedicated servers and shared storage. This can reduce administrative overhead and optimize resource usage, which reduces costs. In fact, most VDI projects are driven (at least in part) by the need to reduce costs for the enterprise.
But what about running VDI in the public cloud? Can this provide cost savings compared to on-premises VDI? In the case of small organizations or short-term deployments, perhaps yes. But for an organization that wants to support several thousand or tens of thousands of desktops, the answer is no. For large corporate VDI projects, the cloud is significantly more expensive.
In this total cost of ownership study, the Evaluator Group compared the cost of a Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 on-premise VDI solution with VMware Horizon to the cost of cloud VDI within AWS WorkSpaces. The results showed that in environments with 5000 or 10 Knowledge Workers or more, economies of scale reduced the cost of local VDI per desktop by more than 000%, while the cost of cloud VDI barely changed as the number of users increased. . For Power Workers, the cost difference was even greater: the VxBlock-based solution was 20-30% more cost effective than AWS.
Beyond the cost difference, the Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 solution offers a better user experience and more control for IT administrators. In particular, a VDI solution for LANs avoids many of the potential security, performance, and communications risks.
Author of the study - , analyst at Evaluator Group.
That's all. Thank you for reading to the end! Learn more about the system you can here. If you have any questions regarding the selection of configurations and purchases of Dell EMC equipment for your companies, then, as always, we will be happy to help in private messages.
Source: habr.com