Real Synergy: F5 and VMware

#VDI Faster deployments, lower costs, better productivity.

Among the many buzzwords associated with marketing like "agile", synergy is often used to promote the notion of increasing overall IT and business effectiveness through the collaboration of one or more systems or organizations.

Like legends and myths, the notion of synergy is based on truth. But that truth is often hard to find, as it relies on being able to measure what has been, in the past, sometimes difficult to measure. While it's always been easy to measure the effectiveness of system-level optimization in terms of TCO, it's been less the case that we could measure productivity. The advent of the programmatic data center is enabling the measurement of this somewhat nebulous metric and provides the insight necessary to compare just which systems, when paired together, is truly synergistic.

Principled Technologies recently conducted detailed testing to compare the synergy between F5 and VMware and a Citrix-Citrix solution for delivering VDI. In addition to the expected optimization benefits of an ADC when deployed with a VDI solution such as VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenDesktop, researchers also dug into the operational aspects of such a deployment.

With IT tasked to deliver solutions faster and more efficiently - or face the reality of shadow IT as an alternative - the speed with which operations can deploy applications and the systems that deliver them is increasingly important to the overall effectiveness, and total cost, of such initiatives.

The report covers the deployment of application delivery controllers in conjunction with an enterprise VDI solution, including evaluation of operational and architectural efficiency. Architectural efficiency is critical because enterprise VDI deployments require more than one connection server to provide high availability and the performance demanded by end-users. Multiple connection servers architecturally requires a load balancing service as well as access control, single sign-on and protocol proxy capabilities to ensure anticipated productivity gains are not negated by additional sign-on processes or decreased application performance.

The measure of success is how well the load balancing service can optimize the architecture to use the least number of connection servers to support the highest number of concurrent users without impacting performance or stability. Using the SSL offload capabilities of an ADC further improves architectural efficiency and lowers total costs by reducing the computational load on VDI connection servers, enabling organizations to support more users with fewer resources.

Principled Technologies found that a combined F5-VMware Horizon View solution provides a more cost effective, simpler and faster deployment for VDI than a comparable Citrix XenDesktop and Netscaler solution.

The report compared the operational efficiency of deploying both solutions, finding an F5-VMware deployment at just less than half an hour to be three times faster than the comparable Citrix deployment. The use of F5 iApps contribute to this operational efficiency and ensures consistent, repeatable results. Costs, too, are 15.7% lower with a joint F5-VMware solution because of the resulting architectural efficiency.

Within the report you can find a detailed analysis of the operational gains achieved from an F5-VMware solution including step-by-step deployment metrics and configuration details. You'll also find a comprehensive explanation of the cost analysis and how the evaluation was conducted.

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Published May 06, 2014

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