What Is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

By eliminating traditional IT silos and enabling IT management from a single tool, HCI lowers OPEX and CAPEX—without sacrificing security, flexibility or scalability. Learn why VMware has the most HCI customers in production worldwide in this infographic.

The components of hyperconverged infrastructure can be implemented separately, depending on your existing architecture and IT needs. 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 evolution can be a costly, complicated process—but HCI can scale and change as needed. VMware HCI is specifically designed for simplicity and scalability to meet rapidly changing business needs. VMware offers the only fully software-defined data center in production today.

Both hyperconverged and converged IT infrastructures integrate storage, compute, networking and management. Hyperconverged systems use software and are hardware-agnostic, while converged solutions rely on hardware and use many traditional IT products, only with simplified architecture and management.

Companies use hyperconverged infrastructure to run most business-critical, tier-one applications. Other common workloads that run on hyperconverged systems include database software, virtual desktop infrastructure, collaboration applications, analytics, remote management and testing environments.

VMware HCI allows you to integrate your existing storage with vSAN, VMware’s software-defined HCI storage solution. vSAN is natively integrated with VMware vSphere, so you can access and use traditional datastores along with hyperconverged storage—all in the same cluster. 

For more details, read the Datasheet.

An HCI appliance combines all 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 architecture set-up and infrastructure maintenance. 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, supporting complex IT and storage needs while remaining cost-efficient.

• Edge computing: HCI makes it easy to design, build and scale edge or branch environments without dedicated on-site IT staff.

• Workload consolidation and file storage: HCI makes it easier to size and migrate workloads across infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, print servers) and database, application and file servers. 

• Testing and development HCI gives developers a cost-effective testing environment that runs similarly to production.

• Enabling hybrid cloud environment HCI reduces the time and cost of transitioning to a hybrid cloud, easily moving virtual machines between on-premises servers and private or public clouds.