Many enterprises deploy Omnissa Horizon to support Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) initiatives, typically on the platform based on VMware vSphere and vSAN. While this infrastructure solution is widely adopted, it often presents challenges in terms of cost efficiency and high performance.

To address these limitations, Arcfra has introduced a joint VDI solution with Omnissa, enabling seamless deployment of Horizon on the Arcfra Enterprise Cloud Platform (AECP). This integrated offering delivers enterprise-class storage performance while reducing VDI deployment costs by up to 61% compared to VMware vSAN, making it a robust choice for both new Horizon deployments and existing users seeking VMware alternatives.

Challenges of Deploying VDI on VMware vSAN

1. Rising Licensing Costs

Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, changes to the licensing model have significantly increased the cost of deploying Omnissa Horizon with VMware infrastructure. Under the new policy, Horizon packages are tied to VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) for VDI, which includes vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCenter Standard, and vSAN Enterprise with 100 GiB of trial capacity per processor core.

If this bundled vSAN capacity is insufficient — a common scenario in VDI environments with high storage demands — organizations need to buy VCF or VVF directly from Broadcom, while acquiring the Horizon license separately from Omnissa. This fragmented licensing approach not only drives up TCO but also reduces flexibility in capacity planning, making it difficult to scale VDI cost-effectively.

2. Performance Constraints Causing Boot Storms

In VDI architectures, storage plays a critical role in user experience and operational efficiency. It must deliver:

• High IOPS to handle boot and login storms.
• Fast profile and user data access to ensure a smooth desktop experience.
• Efficient VM image management for rapid provisioning and updates.
• Resiliency and availability to keep services running without interruption.
• Scalability and cost efficiency to adapt to changing workloads.

Traditional VDI deployments with centralized storage often struggle to meet these requirements, particularly during peak usage events, which is very likely to cause boot storms, lowering logins and application response. Even with vSAN, it tends to encounter cache breakdown under intensive I/O and cause severe performance degradation.

Arcfra AECP for Omnissa Horizon VDI: Cost-Effective and Performance-Driven

To solve the cost and performance challenges, Arcfra has partnered with Omnissa team and jointly developed a leading VDI solution based on Arcfra Enterprise Cloud Platform (AECP). The joint solution from Arcfra and Omnissa offers a cost-efficient and performance-driven alternative to vSAN-based VDI deployments. By running Omnissa Horizon on the AECP (integrated with VMware vSphere), organizations can leverage best-in-class distributed storage to simplify operations and reduce costs.

Significant Cost Savings

The AECP VDI Essential Edition includes all necessary infrastructure software — compute, storage, and networking. Because AECP is only licensed by CPU Core, customers can consume as much storage capacity as they can without any capacity license fees.. This integrated approach delivers over 61% reduction in licensing costs compared to VMware vSAN, while providing superior storage performance. The predictable pricing model allows organizations to scale their Horizon environments without unexpected cost spikes.

Elimination of Boot/Login Storms

Arcfra’s high-performance distributed storage ensures consistent desktop responsiveness, even during peak login periods. By spreading workloads across nodes, the solution eliminates the boot storm challenges, meeting demanding business performance requirements and maintaining a smooth end-user experience.

Rapid Deployment

The solution’s streamlined architecture enables fast, low-complexity deployment. Using standard x86 servers and Ethernet switches, businesses can bring new Horizon environments online quickly and efficiently, accelerating time-to-value and reducing project risk.

Simplified Management

AECP provides a unified management console for the entire VDI infrastructure stack. This reduces the operational burden on IT teams while minimizing the need for specialized hardware expertise.

Scalable, Pay-As-You-Grow Architecture

With its fully distributed design, AECP supports incremental scaling at the component or node level. Organizations can start small and expand as demand increases, enabling true on-demand investment without overprovisioning.

Arcfra AECP vs. VMware vSAN in Capabilities and Cost

Performance & Reliability

When evaluated against VMware vSAN, AECP’s distributed storage — Arcfra Block Storage (ABS) — demonstrates clear advantages in architecture design, licensing model, performance, and stability — all of which are critical for VDI environments running Omnissa Horizon.

ABS provides multiple features for performance optimization, especially data locality — allowing more frequent local reads and writes for a shorter response time than remote I/O, which is critical for avoiding boot storms in VDI scenarios.

More advanced features provided by ABS include:

• Business-First Recover Policy: On the premise of ensuring business I/O, adaptively adjust the speed of recovery or migration according to the system load.
• Cache breakdown avoidance: Given the intelligent data tiering model, ABS is less likely to encounter cache breakdown during the intensive I/O.
• Better snapshot performance: Unlike VMware vSphere snapshot, which relies on redo-log files and disk chains, Arcfra snapshots use independent metadata to avoid snapshot traversal. It also uses a larger extent to contain data. These features effectively reduce latency and enable a rapid restoration of I/O performance after taking a snapshot.

Licensing Cost

A 500-seat (CCU) Omnissa Horizon deployment for office worker workloads demonstrates the tangible cost advantages of the Arcfra solution over a vSAN-based design. In this scenario, the Arcfra AECP (VDI Essential Edition) delivers over 61% savings in total virtualization software licensing costs.

Reference Configuration: 500-Seat (CCU) Office Worker Scenario

More cost savings come from:

• Eliminating capacity-based storage add-on fees.
• Reducing hardware requirements due to higher VM density per node.
• Avoiding the high hardware cost associated with vSAN ESA (all-NVMe + 10Gbps network).

Overall Advantages: Why Arcfra AECP Is the Better Choice for VDI

Performance

• Multiple storage optimization techniques for high and sustainable performance.
• Consistently smooth operation during peak demands such as boot/login storms, patching, or mass cloning.

Reliability

• Architecture with no single point of SSD failure.
• Intelligent data rebalance algorithm for balanced workloads.
• Rapid recovery mechanisms to minimize downtime after SSD failures.

Cost Efficiency

• Unlimited storage capacity usage without architectural limits.
• No need to design or manage disk groups.
• Over 61% savings in total virtualization software licensing costs.

User Experience

• Elimination of boot/login storms for uninterrupted productivity.
• Faster login, boot, patching, and cloning processes.
• Smooth performance for both persistent and non-persistent VDI.

With these advantages, Arcfra offers a scalable, resilient, high-performance, and cost-effective storage foundation for VDI deployments — ensuring both IT teams and end users benefit from a consistently high-quality experience.