Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI)

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Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) Solution Overview

Challenge

Enterprises in Motion and the Participant Worker

IT: Doing More with Less

Cisco VXI

Business Benefits

A Phased, Success-Based Approach

The Workplace Transformed

A Winning Solution for Both the User and IT

Conclusion

For More Information

2


Cisco’s Virtualization Experience Infrastructure or VXI raises the bar on user and IT expectations by delivering a service-optimized desktop virtualization platform with rich services end to end across three Cisco architectures—Data Center, Borderless Networks and Collaboration.

Cisco VXI delivers a superior collaboration and rich media user expe-rience with best in class ROI in a fully integrated, open and validated desktop virtualization solution. VXI enables all categories of worker to enjoy access to any application on any device in any workplace environment, liberated to be more connected, more collaborative and more productive. At the same time IT leaders are relentlessly challenged by tight budgets, limited resources and proliferating data centers demanding more continuity, compliance and security. Now with Cisco VXI IT can deliver timely deployment of the latest services, applications and endpoint devices and a consistently productive user experience, with more cost control of infrastructure and client services, and more protection of business assets.

The Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure permits you to deliver to your employees an environment that is both agile and efficient, that enables personalized and pervasive user interactions, and that combines both openness and control through centralizing business assets.

ChallengeWhat if you as an IT thought leader could deliver ...

All participants in your borderless enterprise a truly virtualized collab-orative workspace—one that delivers a consistent, uncompromised user experience to data and applications, rich media collaboration and communication services, anywhere, across any device, and across any connection, securely and transparently?

A solution that also enhances control and protection of valuable corporate assets, placing them within the confines of a highly efficient, secure and agile virtualized data center, while at the same time

facilitating deployment of new desktops during re-orgs, mergers, acquisitions, and workforce expansion?

A solution that minimizes the total cost of ownership of both IT infra-structure and user workplaces through improved resource utilization and new user endpoint business models? One that for the first time cost-effectively addresses today’s business objectives and initiatives, such as Windows 7 migration, Business Process Outsourcing, compli-ance and business continuance as well as support for contractors, remote branches, and mobile users (Figure 1).Figure 1. Business Challenges

Business ProcessOutsourcing Contractors Remote

BranchWindows 7Migration

MobileUsers

Figure 2. Market Drivers for Cisco Virtual Experience Infrastructure

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Cisco VXI

Business Benefits




Conclusion


Finance

• Comply with government regulations

• Help ensure business continuity and security

• Provide separation of project teams

Customer Care

• More readily assign resources to individual customers and products

• Help ensure that data remains in the data center

• Enable effective offshoring

• Provide a secure and mobile experience for access to patient medical records

• Enable deployment flexibility and lower TCO

Healthcare

3


Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure, or VXI, addresses these aspirations, empowering enterprises to harness the power of participation, liberating their employees from the confines of location, distance, and client technology to create better products, services, and experiences. It permits organizations to make better use of video, mobility, collaboration, and cloud technologies to provide access to the resources, applications, and collaborative services that fuel mass-scale participation, while encouraging operational innovation.

Cisco VXI combines the power of the virtualized collaborative workspace with a virtualization-aware network and virtualized data center to provide a rich services platform that sets a new standard for desktop virtualization solutions. By spanning Cisco’s Data Center, Borderless Networks and Collaboration architectures, Cisco VXI eliminates the feature gaps of existing virtualization solutions (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure—Spanning Data Center, Networks and Workplace.

Cisco Architectures

CiscoCollaboration

Cisco Data CenterBusiness Advantage

CiscoBorderless Networks

VirtualizedCollaborativeWorkspace

VirtualizedData Center

Virtualization-awareBorderless

Network

Challenge



Cisco VXI

Business Benefits




Conclusion


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Enterprises in Motion and the Participant WorkerThe age of the static enterprise is over, and the only constant is change. Businesses—through innovation, management flexibility, and new business processes—are adapting to survive in an increasingly global and competitive environment, and IT is playing an increasingly vital role in enabling this change. The new workforce is mobile and considers personalization, security, and video to be givens, and many of the same requirements face enterprises, both large and small. Project groups and customer teams are fluid, creating dynamic virtual workgroups that cross time zones and organizations and that often may integrate external contractors and suppliers in real time.

The cornerstone of this mobile enterprise is the participant worker. From executives to global project teams to task workers, everyone is a participant in this new, mobile enterprise, bringing together a diversity of expertise, experience, and expectations. No longer attached to a desktop, or even a laptop,, workers demand access to data and services anywhere, at any time, and across a diversity of operating systems, device form factors, networking environments, and work preferences.

These on-the-go employees expect their data and applications—their context—to follow them from the office, to the home, and when in tran-sit, and they expect it to be presented effectively on whatever device they happen to be using. They expect an uncompromised and unen-cumbered user experience, with applications, rich-media content and collaboration services, adapted to their current environment.

IT: Doing More with LessYour role as an IT leader is becoming more demanding in addressing the needs of the participant worker. IT infrastructure is becoming more complex and more costly to maintain. Operating system refreshes and new initiatives often require new, more powerful endpoint hardware and updated applications, while the cost of sending personnel to a user’s desk and even of providing support remotely continues to grow year by year. Likewise the cost of lost productivity, lost data and stolen data, due to misbehaving or mislaid endpoints even overshadows the operational costs.

In an environment of constrained budgets, TCO figures prominently in any new infrastructure decision. Thus, growing user expectations must be balanced with escalating capital and operating costs as traditional deployment and support models no longer suffice.

These challenges are coupled with business needs for security, asset protection, regulatory compliance, and business continuity. New deployments cannot introduce additional complexity into what is already a difficult-to-manage environment and must reduce the implementation risk.

What tools and strategies do you need to handle these seem-ingly diverse requirements? How can you step up to the challenge to provide a solution that effectively balances these multiple corporate imperatives?

Challenge



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Cisco VXI: A Transformational Service-Optimized Desktop Virtualization PlatformCisco VXI is a service-optimized desktop virtualization platform that can deliver any application to any device in any workplace environ-ment, support a rich user experience, and provide IT with additional security and control. It combines the architectural benefits of Cisco’s Data Center, Borderless Networks and Collaboration architectures through a phased and synchronized roadmap and validated system-level designs that eliminate the trade-offs and scalability limitations of existing virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments. In combina-tion with cross-domain professional services and a broad partner ecosystem, Cisco VXI offers a new, more flexible services architecture that addresses critical IT and business requirements rather than just focusing on technical speeds-and-feeds or the latest tactical issue.

The timing for the introduction of Cisco VXI builds on external influences such as globalization, the economy, and environmental awareness. Enterprises that are in the process of virtualizing their data centers now have confidence in the technology’s scalability, manage-ability, and security. In addition, virtualization has become increasingly cost effective. Organizations are gaining confidence in the cloud, with centralized applications and data becoming more common. Organiza-tions also are faced with a diversity of endpoints. The days when an enterprise relied exclusively on just one single standardized desktop or smartphone vendor are coming to an end. Employees are expect-ing choice that aligns with their work styles and lifestyles, encouraging IT to consider new client services business models. Further, employ-ees require access to the same services and experiences regardless of which device is handiest and most accessible at any specific time or location.

Cisco VXI transforms the enterprise with a solution that breaks down the barriers between business units historically associated with the streamlining of the participant workspace. It permits you to deliver to your employees an environment that is both agile and efficient, that enables personalized and pervasive user interactions, and that combines both openness and control through centralizing business assets. It creates a dynamic “desktop cloud” that moves with the user, adapts to the user’s location and client device, and enforces enterprise security policies (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Cisco VXI: Bringing IT Requirements, User Expectations and Market Forces Together

IT Decision Factors: High-Quality User

Experience and Budget Constraints User

Expectations: Anywhere, Any Device,

Any Network, and Any Application

Cisco VXI: Agile and Efficient

Personalized and Pervasive

Open and Controlled

Market Readiness: Virtualization, Cloud

Computing, and Endpoint Diversity

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Business BenefitsCisco VXI offers the following advantages:

• Agile and Efficient Service Provisioning: Cisco VXI enables enterprises to quickly deploy new applications, services, and devices, while at the same time optimizing resource utilization. The result is greater end-to-end productivity and agility, lower operating and capital costs, and ultimately the support of more dynamic business models with lower TCO. With this approach you can set up the computing workplace of a new employee, partner, or contractor with a click of the mouse, using customized user profiles, with no need to order, configure, and implement new endpoint hardware. At the data center, these virtualized workspaces are mapped dynamically to available computing and storage resources, based on the specific user requirements and privileges, increasing efficiency.

• Personalized and Pervasive User Interactions: Cisco VXI creates a customized and consistent virtual workspace experience across multiple devices and networks. Customized service profiles facilitate desktop management, and advanced communications and collaboration applications enable pervasive user interactions. The user’s profile and workspace experience is adapted dynamically based on the network, location, client, and change in role, while an optimal user experience is maintained. For example, application, content, and media support can adapt depending on whether the user is working on an office laptop, the same at home, or a smartphone across a 3G infrastructure. This capability leads to increased workforce efficiency and user satisfaction.

• Open and Controlled Operations: Cisco VXI combines what may seem at first to be two incompatible and competing priorities: an open environment, and control and protection of valuable corporate information and assets. Cisco VXI is supported by a partner ecosystem that provides endpoint flexibility, with choices of storage, endpoint, and hypervisor. At the same time, it provides virtualization-aware control of security and policy and support for high availability and business continuance. With IT now able to more effectively control virtual workspaces while the spectrum of supported clients is broadened, end users perceive that they can choose from an almost open portfolio of endpoint devices. The net result is a balance of innovation and risk mitigation.

With Cisco VXI, the fully virtualized user workspace, network, and data center are combined to provide IT with a manageable, end-to-end strategic asset. These three foundational elements are tied together by service and management layers, creating the first functionally integrated solution that supports end-to-end services, spanning from networked endpoints to the data center. It uses Cisco’s expertise in bringing to market validated solutions that cut across traditional IT and development silos. In fact, Cisco’s enterprise hardware and software development roadmaps are aligned across these three elements to enable the evolution of Cisco VXI as new technologies and require-ments emerge while helping ensure investment protection of the initial deployments (Figure 5).Figure 5. Cisco VXI Architecture: An End-to-end Service optimized Desktop Virtualization Platform

Rich Media

Virtualized CollaborativeWorkspace

Virtualization-AwareBorderless Network

VirtualizedData Center

Security

Virtualized Network Services

PerformanceAcceleration High Availability

EnergyEfficiency

LocationAwareness Mobility Policy

OptimizedVideo /Audio

ScalableData

Center

BorderlessNetworkServices

ValidatedEnd to End

System

Product Portfolio (Cisco and Eco-system Partners)

Cisco Ecosystem

Partners

Services P

ortfolioMan

agem

ent

• The virtualized collaborative workspace, building on the Cisco Collaboration architecture and portfolio, extends the reach of the virtual desktop to a diverse range of endpoint platforms, including thin clients, smartphones, tablets, and other emerging classes of devices. Unlike today’s desktop-only virtualization solutions, this virtual workspace will support critical collaboration capabilities such as telepresence, conferencing and messaging.

Challenge



Cisco VXI

Business Benefits




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• The workplace connects to the desktop cloud through a virtualization-aware network, based on the Cisco Borderless Networks architecture. For the first time, the network maintains awareness of the virtual machine user session, permitting quality-of-service (QoS) and security policies to be applied at the virtual desktop level and then prioritizing media and applications across VDI sessions. The virtualization-aware network also optimizes the bandwidth consumed by each virtual desktop session and also optimizes rich media, print services, and other capabilities, helping ensure an end-to-end optimal user experience, regardless of geography.

• At the core of Cisco VXI is the virtualized data center, based on the Cisco Data Center Business Advantage architecture, which includes the three foundational pillars of unified computing, unified network services, and unified fabric along with industry-leading ecosystem partners. This architecture is ideally suited to scaling the hosting of virtualized desktops and data and communications services with the greatest simplicity and performance and lowest cost. This comprehensive open and standards-based architecture provides computing and network infrastructure simplification and cost reduction, a streamlined operating model, and systems excellence delivered through enhanced security, business continuance, virtual machine (VM) mobility, energy efficiency, and application performance.

• The virtualized network services plane spans the foundational elements, enabling a services-oriented infrastructure and the delivery of a set of capabilities that together create enterprise success:

– Rich media: IT must provide users with a peak, near-native experience, with application fidelity at least equivalent to that which they currently experience on their laptop or desktops. However, current VDI solutions typically lack mechanisms for managing congestion and optimizing bandwidth consumption for rich media traffic. For example, today, streaming live video to multiple users over a VDI environment is very inefficient and will cause bottlenecks across the data center and network infrastructure. For the first time, rich media can use Cisco’s content-aware QoS and collaboration technologies such as voice, video, and rich media conferencing, extending rich media to devices such as the Cisco Cius™ tablet.

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– Performance acceleration: IT is tasked with providing a high-performance infrastructure across the enterprise and to remote users, optimizing both the user experience and the use of network resources. IT must eliminate trade-offs resulting from VDI implementations that are prone to server oversubscription, intensive SSL loads, and sluggish performance. Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) offers WAN compression and acceleration of remote desktop sessions and of rich media transport and print services, while the Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) for SSL offload increases virtual desktop density. In the data center, the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS) allocates memory and processing resources on demand, elastically, offering unique flexibility in allocating the appropriate resources to the associated user virtual desktop (for example, knowledge worker, task worker, or executive user virtual desktop). Cisco Unified Fabric provides a transparent, scalable, and intelligent data center underpinning that delivers the levels of storage throughput and I/O operations per second (IOPS) necessary to help ensure application responsiveness during peak periods.

– Security: Cisco’s end-to-end virtualization-aware infrastructure permits IT managers to meet security requirements by helping ensure user segmentation and policy enforcement for each user workplace at the virtual machine level, eliminating the trade-offs of current VDI implementations, which have limited capability to apply security policies system-wide from the user to the service or application and limited visibility into virtual resources. For the first time, manageability and security, including firewalls, are delivered at the virtual machine and desktop levels, using the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG). Cisco’s broad portfolio includes supplemental VPN solutions such as Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance and Cisco AnyConnect™ VPN Client, which often are required when the desktop virtualization partner’s security server cannot natively terminate sessions using specific display protocols.

– Energy efficiency: IT managers are tasked with saving energy at the desktop, across the network, and within the data center. Within the data center the compute and networking footprint can be reduced by 60% over traditional compute architectures.

This is attributed to the Cisco Unified Computing System virtual desktop density and the network-layer consolidation. Power over Ethernet (PoE) at the desktop powering integrated displays and managed by the Cisco Energy Orchestrator together with the shift from PCs and laptops to tablets and smartphones also contribute to energy efficiency and are drivers for many VDI deployments

– Location services: When the user can be anywhere while the application and data are in the data center, location services are essential to determine access policies. Location services enable IT to understand where the user is accessing the network through the use of the Cisco Mobility Services Engine and the Cisco Wireless Control System so that appropriate business policy can be applied.

– Mobility: The Cisco solution gives IT mobility tools to offer users always-available access to remotely hosted desktops and applications. It enables IT to provide the best possible WiFi experience as well as VPN access or 3G or 4G network access when other networks are unavailable, while tracking these users as they move throughout the enterprise. This capability uses Cisco’s unique Clean Air technology, the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client, and context-aware location services.

– High availability: A major factor promoting adoption of Cisco VXI is businesses’ and users’ growing expectation of fail-safe operation in support of always-on business operations. With desktops hosted in the data center, desktops can be protected and recovered much more effectively. Cisco’s virtualized data center infrastructure allows desktops to be secured on a per–virtual machine basis and permits the user’s virtual desktop to be moved transparently between computing resources within the data center and across data centers, to help ensure preemption of or fast recovery from disruptions.

– Manageability: IT managers see Cisco VXI as an integrated solution, not as a set of separate workplace, network, and data center silos. Cisco VXI treats management as an integral part of the solution, spanning desktop and hypervisor management for desktop allocation, and Cisco UCS Manager for the computing infrastructure.

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The Expertise You Need For Successful Implementation• Backed by Cisco’s proven expertise in networking, collaboration,

storage, and compute, an architectural approach, and a broad ecosystem of partners, Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure Services enable you to build and optimize a highly scalable and secure Cisco VXI solution.

• Working together with you and our industry-leading partners, Cisco Services provides the leading practices, expertise, and skill sets needed to accelerate deployment and help mitigate risks. Our consultants include enterprise and solution architects, professionals with broad expertise in VXI technologies, and project managers. Once your solution is deployed, Cisco Services provides technical support and optimization services to help you maintain an optimal VXI solution as your data center and business needs evolve. Cisco VXI Services enable you to plan, build, and deploy a Cisco VXI solution that enables your enterprise’s employees to securely access the applications and information they need to do their jobs from anywhere, using any device, over any media.

A Phased, Success-Based ApproachCisco VXI offers an architectural approach, so solutions are open and extensible and will allow customers to take advantage of new Cisco and partner innovations as they become available. In addition, these Cisco VXI innovations are being introduced in a phased and synchro-nized way to help customers adopt these new capabilities transpar-ently, to help ensure investment protection and increase return on investment (ROI) at each step. Each phase builds on a successful foundation put in place by the preceding step and using joint Cisco, customer, and ecosystem partner successes. The approach provides advantages to both the IT administrator and the end user.

Phase 1 provides enterprises with a proven and scalable end-to-end desktop virtualization architecture integrated with partners’ technolo-gies such as hypervisors, desktop virtualization software, and storage. In this phase, Cisco VXI offers an outstanding user experience, low cost per desktop, and a solution that is simple to deploy and scale and augmented by Cisco Services offerings.

Future phases expand upon the rich media and client experience, and further extend the solution into a service offering for partners to deliver. The bottom line is that this VXI framework helps our custom-ers build and evolve their VXI strategy and deployments, based on best-of breed technologies and services from Cisco and our industry leading partners.

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The Workplace TransformedThe Cisco VXI service architecture spans multiple industries and enables enterprises to implement a variety of scenarios that transform business models and the employee’s daily interactions (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Cisco VXI Provides Business Benefits Across Many Industries and Segments Including Healthcare, Finance and Customer Care.

Healthcare

• For emergency room personnel, including nurses,

technicians, and interns, tablets replace the bulky

carted PCs and laptop computers currently in use,

permitting IT to standardize on one form factor and

quickly redeploy assets on demand.

• Cisco VXI permits compartmentalized access

to patient records and insurance data, and

telepresence permits quick access to specialists.

• Role-based access control (RBAC) streamlines

workplace support.

• In the future, the tablet could become the

electronic equivalent of the bedside chart,

always up-to-date and secure and moving

with the patient.

Financial

• Traders and mortgage brokers are no longer

bound to a single station and now have access

to their virtual workspace at any location on the

trading floor or in the branch office.

• Upon leaving the office and even after normal

business hours, traders and brokers have access

to a subset of the applications (for example,

applications for research but not for real-time

transactions such as trading), even on a corporate

laptop computer.

• The IT manager has confidence that corporate

data is secured with enforcement of role-based

permissions taking into account location and

even time of day.

Customer Care

• Call-center personnel can be assigned

dynamically based on requirements with their

personalized workplaces available at any location.

• IT can quickly give a subset of workers access to

specialized applications and data. This flexibility

can be critical depending on the customers and

product lines supported; it can also be critical

during new-product launches and when managing

product usability issues.

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A Winning Solution for Both the User and ITCisco VXI provides a winning solution for IT, the end user, and ultimately the whole enterprise. Goals and missions are in harmony, eliminating the sometimes-contentious relationship between the pro-viders and consumers of IT and creating new user and IT collaborative business models.

The architecture, by reducing TCO while offering a consistent user experience, gives the enterprise competitive advantages, enabling organizations to:

• Implement more dynamic business models

• Quickly seize business opportunities

• Enhance IT and workforce efficiency

• Increase productivity and user satisfaction

• Offer quick, easy access to applications and services

• Help ensure sustainable growth and profitability

• Expand IT’s portfolio of solutions

• Offer deployment confidence

ConclusionCisco Virtual Experience Infrastructure is a unique solution, for the first time integrating the workspace, network, and data center into a rich services solution that delivers on the promise of participation. The Cisco VXI journey begins with tried and tested solutions that over time and at your pace will evolve to transform your organization while eliminating risk and the trade-offs between the user experience and budget imperatives. Cisco offers a strategy aligned with enterprise objectives. It uses technical and deployment expertise in an open ecosystem combining best-in-class products to help ensure success.

For More Information• Learn more about Cisco VXI at www.cisco.com/go/vxi.

• Read the Cisco VXI design guides. www.cisco.com/go/designzone_vxi

• Learn more about Cisco Data Center Business Advantage at www.cisco.com/go/dc.

• Learn more about Cisco Borderless Networks at www.cisco.com/go/borderless

• Learn more about Cisco Collaboration at www.cisco.com/go/uc

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Cisco VXI

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Copyright © 2010 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Cisco, Cisco Systems, and the Cisco Systems logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries.

www.cisco.com/go/vxi

http://www.cisco.com/go/designzone_vxi

www.cisco.com/go/dc

http://www.cisco.com/go/borderless

http://www.cisco.com/go/uc

Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI)

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