Continuous Productivity with Always-on VDI

By Dinesh Singh posted 04-03-2020 22:47

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COVID-19 has upended our lives like never before. Getting a VDI project right has always been a complex exercise at the best of times. Planning, deploying and managing VDI has been hit or miss. Many projects never see the light of the day due to budget overruns and some are shelved due to poor user experience. This pandemic has added urgency to the mix. As my colleague Colin Gallagher writes in the blog many businesses have been caught underprepared in infrastructure capacity planning to support the vast majority of their employees working remotely.

Due to its unique characteristics, careful consideration needs to be made for the entire stack of VDI – encompassing network, underlying compute and storage infrastructure – to achieve the business and IT objectives from the solution. Because of so many moving parts, IT teams sometimes miss certain critical details when architecting a remote desktop solution.

Below are among the most common factors that need careful attention for a VDI project to succeed:

Successful end-user experience –

The single biggest challenge to impact a successful VDI implementation is understanding the desired end-user experience outcome. Unlike with traditional desktops – which store most of your apps and data locally while delivering high performance to end users – VDI solutions are hosted on IT infrastructure in central data centers. End users have minimal tolerance for any performance degradation – such as delays in logging in to their desktops, high latency for data retrieval or inconsistent experiences when they move to another office. Users, accustomed to the performance of local desktop resources, are likely to complain if remote desktops introduce even seconds of delay to their routine work operations.

Misaligned resources –
Many of the problems stated above stem from inadequate resource planning in the design phase. Users can be broadly classified into task users, power users, knowledge workers or regular workers. They all serve different business purposes and consequently require different IT resources at compute, memory, storage, and network bandwidth. So, a detailed study of user-profiles is essential to architecting a VDI environment that meets performance expectations.

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With prices falling, flash storage has recently become a standard in backend storage systems. All-NVMe storage systems such as Hitachi Vantara Unified Compute Platform HC (UCP HC) – especially when taking advantage of the recent innovations in VMware Horizon VDI software – pack enough punch to prevent performance-related issues, and so make it easier to plan for future growth. ESG analyst group evaluated the suitability of all-NVMe systems for high-performance apps such as VDI, this document can be referred to for planning and designing.

A further boost in performance for consolidation or visual computing can be achieved by employing a graphics processing unit (GPUs). GPUs have transformed the virtual desktop landscape by providing excellent user experiences for graphic-intensive apps through increasing desktop density per node and saving CPU cycles. Expert advice on deploying VDI with graphics acceleration can be found here.

Controlling Upfront Costs –

Upfront costs in hardware and VDI software licensing can be a show-stopper for many projects. However, if you plan to align your IT budget more closely with new VDI requirements, hyper-converged infrastructure has been proved in real-life environments. A general caveat is that VDI should not be looked at as a cost-saving approach, but rather virtualizing desktops is an efficient way to ensure user mobility while streamlining administration and compliance.

If you do not have an extended team to manage virtual desktop environments – routine tasks such as patching and upgrading software, renewing licenses, and support contract – VMware Horizon Air Hybrid Mode takes away the complexity of managing the environment, while delivering applications and remote desktops from locally-hosted infrastructure. This deployment model dramatically reduces infrastructure requirements and costs, while enhancing security, and maintaining a near-native desktop experience. Tech note on provisioning and managing on-premises desktops and applications via cloud-managed control plane.

Planning for outages –

Hosting desktops and applications on a centralized system is similar to putting all your eggs in one basket. You may have used a Swiss army knife, which is a multi-tool device, symbolizing utility and smart design. If you lose the Swiss army knife, you may lose access to your screwdriver, saw, pliers, cleaners, potentially leaving you high and dry.

Ensuring no single point of failure for all possible components – CPU, storage drives, switch, ports, and even images – is critical. What happens if your data center is impacted by a tsunami, flood or man-made disaster? With virtual desktops going mainstream and being used for business-critical applications, you need to ensure that any outage has the minimum impact on your operations. It’s worth reading about how other enterprise customers are planning business continuity for critical VDI environments.

Too many vendors involved in the project –

It’s a critical decision for IT teams to determine if they have the necessary skills to roll out the desktops on their own or involve an experienced VDI technology partner. Another important decision is whether to buy software and hardware from different vendors – and integrate, test and deploy on your own – or align with a partner who can provide a turn-key solution. If you are evaluating VMware Horizon as your VDI platform, you might consider their prescriptive reference architecture. The certified rapid desktop program minimizes sizing errors and gives you the flexibility to expand your infrastructure when you add more users to the organization.

This hopefully gives you a good starting point to avoid common pitfalls. While some surprises are inevitable, doing detailed due diligence in the design phase reduces risk and will enable a more consistent end-user experience.

Stay safe!

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