The end of the year is usually a time when we reflect on what we've accomplished in the past 12 months and set goals for the upcoming year. One resolution that should be easier to cross off your list in 2017 is to bring new life to your VDI projects.

VDI, or more broadly desktop and application virtualization, is a well-established technology by now and constitutes an important pillar for delivering on the promise of a digital workplace as part of an organization's overall digital business transformation.

In order to be successful in delivering a VDI solution that will delight your end users while reducing the burden on your IT staff you should concentrate on 3 key factors:

• Reduce overall complexity
• Simplify management
• Improve application availability

Cisco HyperFlex VDI for Citrix delivers on these key elements by providing an adaptive infrastructure for your VDI deployments. Together, Cisco and Citrix deliver simplified management and agility through a fully certified solution that can scale as you grow.

Logical view of Cisco HyperFlex VDI for Citrix

With an integrated network fabric, powerful data optimization, and unified management, Cisco HyperFlex Systems bring the full potential of hyperconvergence to your VDI deployments.

HyperFlex provides a cluster configuration that scales resources independently to closely match the resource needs of your VDI environments. You can start small and support tens or hundreds of users and easily and cost-effectively scale to support thousands. After a system is deployed, you simply add nodes to the cluster, and data is automatically re-balanced across all shared resources. You can easily tailor the configuration to support persistent and non-persistent desktops and deliver full desktop infrastructure or application streaming depending on the needs of your workforce. Cisco HyperFlex lets you scale nodes non disruptively, but also independently scale resources. For example, in the case of non-persistent VDI, you can scale compute-only nodes by adding blade or rack servers, increasing VM density and dramatically reducing the cost per VDI instance.

HyperFlex uses the same technology and service profile templates as Cisco UCS, a pillar of the data center. This means managing HyperFlex doesn't require IT managers to learn new tools. You can provision your environment in less than one hour using automatic server configuration through Cisco UCS service profile templates and improve automation and scalability with UCS Manager and XenDesktop user profile templates that pre-define detailed user access policies.

Cisco HyperFlex VDI for Citrix supports virtual GPU sharing to bring high-end graphics and HD video processing to every device, giving even mobile devices and tablets the equivalent power of workstations costing thousands of dollars.

See how you can easily provision and deploy 1,000 virtual desktops with Cisco HyperFlex VDI for Citrix and deliver a spectacular user experience with sub-second baseline response time.

Also, for an in depth technical discussion on how to set up your HyperFlex environment and provision Citrix XenDesktop, check out this great blog series on the Citrix User Group Community.

Furthermore, we are working on a Cisco Validated Design due out later this month that will provide you all the hardware and software guidelines for deploying a 1,200-seat mixed workload on an 8-node HyperFlex cluster with Citrix XenDesktop 7.11. So come back and visit our data center blog page often!

To learn more about Cisco HyperFlex VDI for Citrix check out http://www.accelerateyourworkforce.com/

And if you happen to be heading to Citrix Summit in Anaheim next week, stop by the Cisco booth to talk to me about Cisco HyperFlex VDI for Citrix or ping me on Twitter @FrancoiseBRees.