7 Considerations When Implementing a Virtual Desktop

Virtualizationhas changed the way business functions today. It used to be that an applicationwould be placed onto its own physical server, causing issues around power,cooling, floor space, supportability and manageability. This caused majorheadaches for IT, and business was forced to look at disruptive technologies toaddress these infrastructure concerns. Although virtualization in some form hasexisted since the 1970's, VMware was the first company to cause truedisruption and enable businesses to take full advantage of the benefits ofvirtualization.

Today, asvirtualization technologies have matured and IT's familiarity around thetechnology has increased, the vast majority of server workloads have beenmigrated or built upon virtualization platforms. Now, a natural evolution inIT's use of virtualization is the desktop.

Companies are facing greater challenges with the desktop than ever before. Ten years ago people didn't work as flexibly, and there wasn't the multitude of smart phones, laptops and tablets that there are today. People don't want to feel constrained by the method in which they access their work, and anywhere, anytime access has become a common phrase that IT hears all the time. Dynamic desktops are the future, and it's no surprise that companies are looking toward desktop virtualization solutions like VMware Horizon and Citrix XenDesktop.

How to implement a desktop virtualizationproject

When embarkingupon a desktop virtualization project, it's important to perform a detailedplanning and assessment phase, in much the same way you would have when dealingwith server virtualization. Too often customers, integrators and vendors guesswhen creating virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). This causes end userdissatisfaction, increased costs and management, as well as project stall orcancellation. All of these could be avoided with proper planning from theoutset. There are many challenges and barriers to desktop transformation, sowhen beginning your VDI project, you should always consider the following:

• Are you selecting the right desktops to be virtualized?
• Is your virtual infrastructure design viable?
• Can you migrate user profiles and data easily to this new platform?
• Can you accurately measure and monitor user experience?
• Can you identify issues at the user, machine, application, network and storage level?
• Can you monitor latency of access to network resources and performance of storage?
• Are you wasting too much time troubleshooting slowness, bottlenecks, etc.?

A virtual desktopassessment will answer these questions. It will ensure that the architecture isnot under-provisioned or over-provisioned. It will allow your business torealistically look at what you have, what you use, and what you need.

A virtual desktop assessment allows you to

• Validate inventory and consumption
• Focus on the right use cases first
• Deploy PoCs and pilots that perform better, scale faster and accelerate the transformation process
• Create a context for comparison between current and new environments, based on hard numbers as opposed to perception

How to do a virtual desktop assessment

A virtual desktopassessment is typically accomplished with automated data collection, whichidentifies baseline needs and helps determine best strategy. I like to tellcustomers that almost all desktop users can have a virtual desktop. However,there are many different types of desktop users and they do need to be placedinto different desktop use cases.

For example, adeveloper who works with 3D rendering tools and powerful workstations is adifferent use case then a worker who typically only accesses Microsoft Exceland web applications. A virtual desktop assessment will help filter these usecases and allow IT to architect the infrastructure appropriately to include alluse cases that are in scope.

Virtual desktop assessment metrics

A good virtualdesktop assessment tool will be able to help answer all the questions above. Iwork with a toolset from a company called LiquidWare Labs. Their solution installs a lightweight agentonto the physical desktop. This agent securely uploads inventory andperformance metrics to a central hub appliance within the customers datacentre. This hub is the Information Engine.

A wide variety ofmetrics including machine configuration, utilization, application, network andstorage usage, as well as user login info and other metadata is collected, andthen the appliance uses the collected metrics to group users and machines intofitness groups. A VDI fitness group categorized as Good means that theseusers' desktops can be virtualized with fewer resources than a VDI fitnessgroup categorized as Fair or Poor. Keep in mind that having users in aFair fitness group doesn't mean their desktops can't be virtualized; it justmeans a different set of resources will have to be provided for these desktops.