In the last blog I addressed on-board architecture for UCS and VDI. In this article I’m going to talk about what we refer to as Simplified Architecture. This is when you use a small storage appliance such as from Nimble Storage. Nimble is just an example, but essentially you create smaller pods and attach the storage directly to the fabric interconnects. This isn’t a very scalable model, but great for a couple hundred virtual desktops.
It also reduces complexity and offers a lower initial cost. This is also a great solution for non-persistent or floating virtual desktops. Depending on the storage appliance you can use pretty much any kind of storage protocol to connect, such as Fibre Channel, NFS, FCoE, and iSCSI.