Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and virtual applications offer the benefits of improved data security, increased employee productivity, simplified desktop operations, and reduced infrastructure costs. The cloud enables a digital workplace transformation by adding resource elasticity and by dramatically reducing the infrastructure burden of desktop management.
Moving to the cloud offers many benefits, but you must also consider some of the challenges including the migration of persistent desktops and home directory data from on-premises, the orchestration of virtual desktop deployments, supporting roaming users from cloud region to cloud region, vendor lock-in, and hybrid VDI requirements.
NetApp can help you capitalize on the benefits of VDI in the cloud while avoiding many of the challenges. We offer NetApp Virtual Desktop Service, a native VDI orchestration software service, best in class cloud storage and data management, as well as a fully managed VDI service for Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure. As a service, it simplifies deployment and management of a VDI environment on your choice of infrastructure including AWS, Azure, Google, Citrix, or VMware.
NetApp offers a comprehensive solution for large enterprises with remote and branch offices by combining Virtual Desktop Service with Global File Cache to support the infrastructure necessary for shared user data at remote sites.
You can eliminate the complexity of WVD deployments with NetApp Virtual Desktop Service. NetApp removes the barrier of PowerShell expertise by providing a simple Graphical UI to deploy, manage and maintain your WVD environment(s). NetApp Virtual Desktop Service simply funnels the hundreds of WVD setup options into a few key questions and then builds out your custom environment.
NetApp Virtual Desktop Service creates and orchestrates all the required components – host pools, session servers for multi-user Windows 10, and app groups that define user access to desktops and applications. With Virtual Desktop Service, you are just minutes away from deploying hundreds or thousands of new WVD VMs for a variety of end user use cases.
While there is a variety of VDI methods and vendors to choose from, they all require file shares for the users’ data and profiles. Azure NetApp Files and Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud or AWS are fast, simple to use, reliable and powerful file services in the largest clouds in the world, with industry leading integrated data management capabilities. Customers can now securely move their desktops to the cloud in a shorter amount of time and still ensure the desktops are performant, secure, available and economical.
Some organizations prefer to implement roaming profiles so that as workers move from one region to another, they always have access to their instance in a location close to them so that the user experience is still good. For roaming profiles, organizations need a way to move the profiles and data. NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides a powerful infrastructure with the APIs and partner integrations to simply transfer the end users profile and data from one cloud region to another.
Simplicity
Performance at the right price
Security
Automation
Agility
Support for roaming desktops