Adopting and implementing a hyper-converged IT system can bring benefits to your organization such as reduced staff cost and easier expansion due to growth. But determining what applications your planned hyper-converged infrastructure will run and the type of workloads you place on it is the first step in the move to HCI.
As with any major technology or systems purchase, proper advance planning is vital to ensure you make the best choices. You can avoid buying needless amounts of HCI capacity and can ensure your system is ready for future expansion. This starts with analysis.
Begin with the applications you will run. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) was a common early use for HCI, but any application that runs on heavily virtualized infrastructure is a good fit. A hyper-converged IT system allows you to parse out the specific resources of compute and storage to any block of virtual machines (VMs) based on what applications they will run. But not all VM users will be doing the same tasks. Different types of applications will require a different set of assigned resources from the virtual pool.
Variations in the workload need to be analyzed, so you can set your hyper-converged IT system to deliver the proper virtual resources. This includes both the demands placed on the HCI system by different applications and the work patterns of the people using the VMs those applications run on. If the bulk of your employees all work the same hours in the same time zone, you will need to provision enough resources to handle the boot storm of everyone logging in at roughly the same time.
