Home > Storage > PowerStore > Virtualization and Cloud > PowerStore: VMware Horizon VDI Best Practices > Capacity
The density of data on VDI tends to be high because many Horizon VDI environments use data-reduced clones. With profile-redirection technology like VMware Dynamic Environment Manager (DEM), clone pools appear as persistent to users. DEM enables users to personalize their desktop, but pools can still employ the benefits of nonpersistent VMs. Keeping the VMs small and clean improves performance and recovery time.
The advantages of small virtual desktops include faster boot times, reduced capacity requirements, reduced pool creation time, and fewer updates required. With instant clones, the administrative overhead is reduced even further with the automatic refresh of virtual desktops on logout. Any misconfiguration in a VM is cleared when the user logs out and the machine is recloned.
Drive counts for block-only VDI are a function of IOP requirements rather than capacity. Since the VMs generate many IOPs per TB of storage that is consumed, performance is more of a concern than capacity.
In a unified-file-storage product, capacity may increase drive counts beyond performance requirements. To see the NAS limits of the PowerStore platform, see the document Dell EMC PowerStore: Best Practices on the PowerStore Info Hub.
The number and size of the file shares or exports determine the capacity that must be added, based on performance guidance on Dell.com/Support.