VDI and WAAS

Further to my previous post on Is network acceleration useful for VDI?. Cisco have a post up on their Data Center Networks blog about VDI. In the white paper linked off this post it states

The joint Cisco and VMware solution optimizes VMware VDI delivery and allows customers to achieve the benefits of VMware VDI by providing the following features:

• Near-LAN performance for virtual desktops over the WAN, improving performance by 70 percent
  
• Increased scalability of the number of VMware VDI clients, increasing the number of clients supported by 2 to 4 times, and massive scalability of VMware VDI and VMware VDM data center infrastructure
  
• 60 to 70 percent reduction in WAN bandwidth requirements
  
• Optimization of printing over the WAN by 70 percent, with the option of a local print server hosted on the Cisco WAAS appliance
  
• Improved business continuity by accelerating virtual image backup by up to 50 times and reducing bandwidth by more than 90 percent
  

Just like other vendors some bold claims. Some of these are simply distractions, improving transport of virtual image backup across a WAN link for DR purposes is not really a VDI issue, thats stretching the friendship and moving into marketing spin. However I have seen some of the internal Cisco analysis on the acceleration of RDP/VDI and it does look to stack up. Hopefully in the new year I will have completed some testing.

As mentioned in my post on Cloud,  the need and adoption of WAN acceleration is going to heat up next year. We all need to pay attention to this space, with the usual eye of lets see the reality. If they vendors are going to keep spruiking it, fair game that we hold them to account for deeper details.

Rodos