F5 and VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Solution BriefVMware VDI
F5 and VMware Virtual Desktop InfrastructureF5 helps ensure maximum performance and availability for VDI
VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is the premier virtual desktop solution in the marketplace. Customers are deploying it in a myriad of different ways and reaping the bene? ts of manageability, ef? ciency and reliability. Virtual desktop technologies like VDI achieve their impressive bene? ts by moving the computational and management resources from the client side to the server side. This centralization brings many bene? ts, but requires careful planning to avoid the pitfalls of reduced performance and availability. There are common variables that can be easily addressed when deploying VDI to local clients (within the local area network) to ensure maximum performance and availability. However there are additional more complex variables that arise when the end-user is located in a branch of? ce (over a Wide Area Network) or another remote network. These variables are introduced primarily by data being transferred outside the corporate ? rewall About F5 and VMware: or VPN, over congested links or by access from an autonomous network. Addressing As the global leader in Application these additional issues can make the difference between happy and frustrated end users.Delivery Networking, F5 brings There are three categories of "incremental" risk to consider when deploying VDI over a significant increases in performance, Wide Area Network. Each of these can affect the success of the project:scalability and availability for applications that run on VMware. a. Business ContinuanceHowever extracting the full benefit b. Securityof running an application in a virtual environment requires intelligent and c. Operating Expensesautomated load balancing of the virtual machines. To demonstrate Speci? cally, these risks translate to:the benefits and deliver increased integration between F5 BIG-IP and . Lower than expected performance by the centralized Virtual Deskop Manager VMWare technology, F5 is a VMware (VDM) server infrastructureTechnology Alliance Partner. This . Poor user experience from remote sitescollaboration enables F5 to leverage VMware APIs and SDKs to integrate . High cost of bandwidth to branch of? cesthe two lines of products, ensuring . Reduced employee productivity if the VDI deployment is inaccessiblemaximum support for customers of the joint solution.
How Can F5 Help?
F5 has several solutions that help reduce these risks.Intelligent Traf? c Direction and Increased PerformanceF5 BIG-IP Local Traf? c Manager (LTM) brings advanced application delivery networking performance to VDI. This can result in signi? cant improvement in performance and capacity of VDM servers, through precise load balancing, traf? c management and by of? oading processor-intensive functions such as SSL termination and compression.. Load Balancing Virtual Machine Servers - BIG-IP LTM has the ability to provide complete traf? c management services to VDM servers and the VMware Virtual Infrastructure behind them. This ensures maximum availability and performance of the infrastructure.. VDI client connection persistence - F5 BIG-IP LTM can manage client connection persistence based on unique sessions through it's iRulesT feature; which can be more robust than persisting based on the typical source IP address. For example, if users are accessing VDI from a web proxy, or NAT device, such as those used by large service providers or enterprise customers, LTM can distribute and persist the connections amongst all VDM connection servers rather than sending all following connections from that proxy server to a single connection or security server; as would be the case with simple or source address persistence.. SSL Of? oad - BIG-IP LTM has the ability to of? oad the SSL termination typically done by the VDM infrastructure. This can of? oad a large amount of CPU cycles from the servers to BIG-IP, a high-performance, function-speci? c appliance. . Compression - BIG-IP LTM has the ability to provide asymmetric compression to the client for traf? c such as javascript and html.Data Center AccessThe BIG-IP Global Traf? c Manager (GTM) has the ability to route incoming VDI traf? c to the highest performance data center at any given time, depending on the end user's location, link conditions and data center conditions. This ensures that if one data cente... [download for more]