With the changing dynamics of the modern-day workforce, the clear need for virtual infrastructure, and the diversity of user types across the FSI sector, it has become increasingly challenging for IT teams to design, deploy, configure, and manage a professional graphics VDI platform for applications that historically ran on physical workstations.

Different organizations can have vastly different needs with respect to the type of IT infrastructure that is best suited to their particular requirements, ranging from hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to converged infrastructure (CI) to standard three-tier designs where the compute and storage components can be designed and scaled independently. Some of these considerations are discussed in the chapter that follows.

As one example of a suitable infrastructure, Dell Technologies has designed and validated a solution for virtual desktop infrastructure for FSI based on VxRail Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), powered by Dell EMC PowerEdge server platforms, VxRail HCI system software, and VMware Cloud Foundation.

In this technical white paper, we explain this architecture and its key components. We have also specified the configurations for the user personas, including the CPU sizing, the number of virtual machines (VMs) per host, the number of vCPUs, the amount of memory, the operating system, the user storage, and, for the trader persona, the NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) profile. Additionally, we present the validation and performance testing that was carried out for several of the FSI personas.

Financial services user profiles

The FSI segment typically has a set of highly specialized user profiles when it comes to the implementation of VDI. This solution has been designed to support several of these personas, including:

• The Front Office or Branch Worker
• The Knowledge Worker
• The Software Developer
• The Financial Trader

These FSI personas are explored in more detail in the following chapter.