What is Hyper-converged infrastructure?

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a software-defined IT infrastructure that virtualizes all of the elements of conventional "hardware-defined" systems. HCI includes, at a minimum, virtualized computing , software-defined storage, and virtualized networking. HCI typically runs on commercial off-the-shelf servers.

The primary difference between converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure is that in HCI both the storage area network and the underlying storage abstractions are implemented virtually in software rather than physically in hardware. Because software-defined elements are implemented in the context of the hypervisor, management of all resources can be federated across all instances of a hyper-converged infrastructure.