15
Building Blocks 15 With this approach and granularity in the design, one can now scale
the environment in groups of 100 users. This allows for a slow and steady approach
and provides predictable values that organizations can plan around for deployment,
performance, capacity, and costs. If organizations want to scale faster and in larger
quantities, they just drop in multiple building blocks at once.
Lastly, the building block approach has proven attractive as a majority of customer
deployments like to start with smaller deployments and scale up from there. The "start
small and pay as you grow" model enables them to invest smaller amounts of capital
up front, and to gain experience as the deployment grows. The next section covers
the different types of infrastructure architectures available today and how each of
them supports or doesn't support the building block approach.
Hypervisors
The hypervisor is an important layer in your infrastructure design. It's directly
responsible for a healthy share of the performance, availability, resilience, and
manageability of your solution.
Hypervisor Landscape
In today's virtualization environment there is a solid list of enterprise-ready hypervisor
options. The list narrows when you look at hypervisors that routinely have EUC and
VDI use cases deployed on them, and consists of the following:
• Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer)
• Nutanix AHV
• VMware vSphere (ESXi)
• Microsoft Hyper-V
Reasons to consider change
There are any number of reasons for organizations to consider changing their hypervisor,
ranging from simplifying the architecture and operations of the hypervisor layer, to
increasing security, to reducing vendor lock-in and eliminating costs.
