11 Responses

  1. forbsy
    forbsy at |

    I'm afraid I don't realy see the value of the Assurance program. I do a lot of work for customers on VDI. The first and most important aspect of any VDI project is to fully understand exactly what the physical desktops are doing while running in production. You need to understand user/system resource consumptions and constraints. You need to understand what the use cases are.

    As you could imagine, being able to collect/analyze this information across hundreads/thousands of users is very difficult. It's no different than the days of server virtualizatiuon where you would need to conduct an assessment using something like Capacity Planner to capture the important metrics so you could intelligently understand which servers to virtualize, and what the ESX(i) footprint would need to look like.

    Asking a customer to just tell you what Nutanix bucket their users fall into is asking for the project to be undersized or oversized. A desktop assessment has to be performed to properly vet out the use cases and be able to rightsize the infrastructure. The assessment data will be able to tell you what the use cases actually look like.

    For example, I've done many assessments where the customer use cases were heavily skewed on CPU and IOPs, but not RAM. Others have been skewed on CPU and RAM but not IOPS. Others RAM and IOPS and not CPU.

    There really isn't such a thing as real world VDI user profiles. Each customer has unique infrastructure, applications and use cases that drive their own unique user profiles. Establishing a set of criteria for a Task Worker (CPU, RAM, IOPS, Storage) just doesn't make sense IMO, and leads to customers trying to fit a square into a circle.

    As a customer I'd rather define what my users need based on actual data and then procure infrastructure based on that. If my users require 2 x vCPU, 4GB RAM, 20 IOPS I procure for that. They might require 1 x vCPU, 4GB RAM, 50 IOPS, so I'll look to procure for that.

    I just think it's too easy to ask people to guess which pre-defined bucket their users fall into and build a VDI infrastructure based on that. If I do my due diligence and conduct an assessment at the start, I have the data whereby I don't guess and know what I actually require.

    Reply
  2. jordan57
    jordan57 at |

    Valid points Forsby, but I don't think Nutanix is telling anyone to guess on their user metrics. I look at it in this way. After I do my user studies and I understand my requirements I can then use those to order from the Nutanix VDI program.

    This gives me the assurance that what I order will meet my requirements. This should help people with the infrastructure layer. And they plan to stand behind what they sell. You're not going to get any flash vendor stand behind something like this. They will look to prove that the storage is doing its job and pass blame to something else.

    Reply
    1. forbsy
      forbsy at |

      Hi jordan57. If you do an assessment you already know your requirements. At that point you should be able to go to Nutanix, or any other vendor(s) and procure what your actual requirements are. The assessment puts you in a place where you're not worried about your platform falling over.
      Telling a customer that you just have to know the profile of the users you want VDI for, is being far too simplistic IMO. There's not really such a thing as real-world VDI profiles. You see them all over the place used for high level simplistic sizing exercises, but they aren't realistic. I've used them before for past projects and I can safely tell you that way doesn't work.
      So, now that you've done your assessment and you feel you want to leverage this assurance program, what do you do when your use case resource requirements don't fit any of the Nutanix Assurance use cases? All I'm trying to say is that once you know you need a car with 350 horse power, 4 wheel drive, leather seats, A/C and GPS, you go and order exactly that – not something that doesn't meet your requirements.

      Reply
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  4. McMutley
    McMutley at |

    How many nodes/hosts are in your VDI clusters shown in the first pic (assuming these are Nutanix clusters), and how many node/hosts failures can each cluster tolerate?

    Reply
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  6. vcdx001
    vcdx001 at |

    +1 on what Michael is describing. This aligns with the VCDX methodology for infrastructure design. There is also one thing to consider when looking at what cloud providers support. There is consumer grade and there is enterprise grade. There is front-end infrastructure and back-end infrastructure. QA environments have common uses cases and some corner use cases which result in design guidelines to help in design choices and design patterns used. The above calls out an approach to provide flexibility so that you can support greenfield design or upgrade design solutions.

    Reply
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