--- title: What is hyperconverged infrastructure? url: https://www.vmware.com/topics/hyperconverged-infrastructure description: Learn about hyperconverged infrastructure, a software-defined system that combines traditional data center elements. --- # What is hyperconverged infrastructure? Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a software-defined, unified system that combines all the elements of a traditional data center: storage, computing, networking, and management. By converging these critical functions into a single software layer, HCI solutions eliminate the complexities of traditional data centers. With HCI, businesses can streamline storage operations, minimize complexity, reduce costs, and unlock new performance levels, efficiency, and flexibility. The software-defined nature of HCI also makes it simpler to adapt to changing business needs, whether in on-premises data centers, private clouds, hybrid environments, or at the edge. By delivering enhanced performance, simplified management, and improved resource utilization, HCI helps organizations meet the demands of modern workloads while driving down costs. ## How hyperconverged infrastructure works A hyperconverged platform has four tightly integrated software components: - Storage virtualization - Compute virtualization - Storage networking - Advanced management Virtualization software abstracts and pools resources and dynamically allocates them to applications in VMs or containers. HCI achieves this by combining industry-standard servers with locally attached storage devices and a distributed software layer that addresses the challenges of traditional storage. By replacing complex and costly disparate legacy systems, HCI empowers organizations to precisely size workloads and scale flexibly as the business demands. In addition to the integrated compute and storage platform, HCI solutions include a centralized management interface, allowing administrators to manage all HCI resources from a single pane of glass. This unified management eliminates the need for separate tools to manage servers, storage, and networking components. All of this results in a flexible, efficient hyperconverged infrastructure that can adjust to changing workload requirements with agility. The tightly integrated nature of these components in an HCI solution reduces the need for separate management tools, minimizes manual administration, and optimizes performance. By providing a unified solution, HCI enables businesses to simplify operations, enhance scalability and performance, and lower costs, all while supporting the demands of modern, dynamic applications. ## Hyperconverged infrastructure benefits HCI transforms traditional IT operational models with simple, unified resource management, offering a multitude of benefits: - **Simplified management:** HCI consolidates computing, storage, networking, and management into a single, unified platform, significantly reducing the complexity of data center management. A centralized management tool enables simplified operations and streamlined workflows. HCI replaces manual processes and siloed operational expertise with a converged IT team that monitors and manages all resources. - **Flexibility and scalability:** HCI users have the flexibility to scale out by adding nodes to a cluster, scale up by adding nodes to drives, or with disaggregated HCI, independently scale compute and storage resources. With HCI, organizations can easily adapt to changing demands by rapidly adding storage resources as needed. - **Optimized performance and efficiency:** Leveraging the latest, high-performance, industry-standard hardware, HCI delivers superior performance and resilience. HCI delivers high throughput and low latency, ensuring business-critical applications run at peak performance while maximizing storage efficiency. - **Cost savings:** HCI replaces expensive and complex legacy infrastructure with a cost-efficient, software-defined model that runs on affordable hardware. Unlike traditional storage, HCI does not require high upfront costs, costly fiber channel networking, or specialized teams for manual operations, driving down CapEx and OpEx. HCI leverages industry-standard x86 servers for compute and storage resources, avoiding the need for costly purpose-built storage and networking investments. ## Recommended for You ## Hyperconverged infrastructure use cases - **Business-Critical Applications:** HCI enables organizations to achieve high performance for their most vital workloads. HCI can expedite deployment with highly automated processes and reduce storage costs compared to legacy storage solutions. Hyperconverged infrastructure can increase availability while reducing both capital expenditures (CapEx) and operational expenses (OpEx) with high-performance storage and simplified management. - **Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI):** Hyperconverged infrastructure enhances user experience and optimizes desktop and application performance. HCI offers a straightforward, cost-efficient, and scalable infrastructure for VDI. One of HCI’s key advantages is a linear scaling model, allowing IT teams to purchase only the capacity needed now and scale incrementally as demands grow. This can be done by scaling "out" with additional nodes or scaling "up" by increasing storage capacity. Features like deduplication and compression help minimize overall capacity requirements, making HCI a popular and practical choice for VDI deployments. - **Edge/Remote Offices and Branch Offices (ROBO):** Hyperconverged infrastructure boosts local IT performance by allowing users to manage it from the data center. HCI enables them to start with a small physical footprint of just two nodes plus witness and expand as needed. The streamlined management provided by HCI reduces the need for on-site, specialized IT staff, lowers operational costs, and ensures that remote locations benefit from the same performance, security, and resilience as the core data center, even as they scale. - **Cloud Native Applications:** HCI enables users to run, monitor, and manage storage for containers and virtual machines on the same platform. Hyperconverged infrastructure provides comprehensive data management for both stateless and stateful applications. HCI allows developers to deploy, scale, and manage workloads with ease. At the same time, administrators benefit from consistent infrastructure management across both traditional and cloud-native applications, reducing operational complexity and increasing agility. ## Recommended for You - [Private Cloud](https://www.vmware.com/topics/private-cloud) ## Related Products - [VMware Cloud Foundation](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vmware-cloud-foundation) - [VMware vSphere Foundation](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsphere-foundation) ## Also of Interest - [What is Platform Engineering?](https://www.vmware.com/topics/platform-engineering) - [VMware vSAN](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsan) - [VMware vSphere Foundation | Virtualization Platform](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsphere-foundation)