VDI and Compute-Intensive Workloads

It’s no secret to anyone that servers are more powerful than desktop or laptop computers. While users love the svelte form factor of a laptop computer or a well-sculpted desktop computer, the reality is that high performance hardware tends to be physically large, requires ludicrous amounts of electricity, is often noisy and is likely to output a great deal of heat.

Many jobs, such as those involving Computer Aided Design (CAD), require substantial hardware resources. For example, large complex CAD diagrams can require substantial amounts of memory and processing capacity and substantial graphical processing capacity for the display. A computer that doesn’t have the appropriate hardware capacity will either be unable to open the CAD diagram or will make it tough for users to interact with the document.

For example, if a designer opens a large CAD diagram on a computer without sufficient capacity, she won’t be able to fluidly rotate the diagram, zoom in or out or manipulate the design. Modern VDI, which can deliver high performance graphical processing and the ability to provision substantial processing and memory capacity, provides a solution to this problem. Rather than provision a designer with a large, expensive and noisy workstation loaded with extensive processor, RAM and GPU capacity, organizations can instead provision VDI servers in a like manner.

Now, it doesn’t matter what processor, RAM, and graphical processing capacity is on the designer’s computer because all of the hardware processing takes place on the VDI server. The designer’s computer simply needs to display the resulting output—a task that even a mobile device like an iPad can handle.

It also gives the designer a degree of flexibility in that they are no longer tied to a desk, but instead can work on complex CAD diagrams from anywhere using any device that can make a connection to the VDI server.

Underwritten by HPE, NVIDIA and VMware