What Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

Eliminating traditional IT silos and managing everything from a single tool means lower OPEX and CAPEX for your IT infrastructure. And with HCI, you don’t have to sacrifice security, flexibility or scalability. But some solutions make capitalizing on HCI efficiency easier than others. Learn why VMware has the most HCI customers in production worldwide in this infographic.

The components of hyperconverged infrastructure can be implemented separately and one at a time, depending on existing architecture and your IT needs. To deliver on its potential, an HCI solution shouldn’t be tied to a specific hardware platform. VMware HCI allows you the freedom to choose your preferred platform, fully integrate with your existing infrastructure, and protect and optimize existing investments.

Data center scaling and evolving can be a costly, complicated process. Luckily, a key benefit of HCI is its ability to scale and change as needed. VMware HCI in particular is designed for simplicity and scalability for rapidly changing business needs. Only VMware has the complete set of offerings for a fully software-defined data center in production today.

Hyperconverged and converged IT infrastructures both integrate the four components of a data center: storage, compute, networking and management. While hyperconverged systems accomplish this through software, making it hardware-agnostic, converged solutions rely on hardware. A converged infrastructure data center uses many of the same products as traditional IT, just with a simplified architecture and easier management.

Companies are using hyperconverged infrastructure to run most types of business-critical, or tier-one, applications thanks to its high availability. Other common workloads that run on hyperconverged systems include database software like Oracle,  virtual desktop infrastructure, collaboration applications, analytics, remote management, and testing environments.

VMware HCI allows you to integrate your existing storage within the hyperconverged infrastructure solution. vSAN is VMware’s software-defined storage solution for hyperconverged infrastructure. vSAN is natively integrated with VMware vSphere, which manages compute resources, including storage. This means you can access and use traditional datastores along with hyperconverged storage—all in the same cluster.

For more information, read the Solution Overview.

A hyperconverged infrastructure appliance combines all the data center components—storage, compute, networking and management—within a single, pre-configured hardware box. Deploying HCI with an appliance reduces operational costs and simplifies set-up and maintenance. You don’t have to worry about building the architecture or configuring and managing the underlying infrastructure. Dell EMC VxRail is a turnkey HCI appliance jointly engineered by VMware and Dell.

Common uses of hyperconverged infrastructure include:

•  Virtual desktop infrastructure: HCI streamlines and simplifies VDI, which has the potential for lots of IT complexity and storage needs. HCI combines everything that’s needed for VDI into one package, and provides just enough storage needed, remaining cost-efficient.

•  Edge computing: HCI makes it easy to design and build small edge or branch environments without a lot of on-site IT staff, and to scale up quickly as needed.

• General workload consolidation and file storage: HCI makes sizing and migrating workloads simpler. These workloads can include infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, print servers), database servers, application servers and file servers. 

• Testing and development: HCI gives developers a cost-effective testing environment that runs similarly to production but without a lot of investment needed.

• Enabling a hybrid cloud environment: HCI can reduce the time and cost involved with transitioning to a hybrid cloud and when moving virtual machines between on-premises servers and private or public clouds.