One of the biggest challenges of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) project is getting started. VDI is a big commitment of time and budget resources and no one wants to be associated with a VDI project that stalls, doesn’t live up to expectations or fails all together. Given all the variables in a VDI project all three of those are possible outcomes and reasonable fears. Potentially more than any other IT project knowledge is power in VDI.

Success in life and IT is the elimination of variables. Liquidware Labs’ software does just that. The Liquidware product family provides you with the advantage of knowing upfront if your organization is a good VDI candidate with Stratusphere Fit. Then they provide you with additional software to manage the user workspaces with ProfileUnity as well as provide service assurance and diagnostics to maintain top performance with Stratusphere UX. Not only can they help insure VDI success they can also increase the speed and level that return on investment (ROI) is reached.

The first step in the VDI journey, assessment, is probably the most important and because of the number of desktops, the most difficult. Unlike server virtualization where the initial ROI can come from an obvious reduction in servers, the desktop virtualization project’s ROI is not so obvious. Knowing which desktops should be virtualized and which ones should be left alone is critical. StatusSphere Fit provides an automated assessment and analysis of all the enterprise’s desktops. By looking at variables like CPU, network utilization, storage resource utilization, system configuration and even external hardware attached, physical desktops are grouped by how well they will work as virtual desktops.

This knowledge allows IT to focus on the desktops that have the best potential in a VDI environment first, bringing an early success to the project and leaving out desktops that will often be more trouble than they are worth if they are virtualized. Often it may be a matter of waiting for VDI technology to catch up to these desktop configurations but in some cases it may make more sense to just leave those users out of the VDI project all together. The key in either case is that user complaints are reduced and thinly stretched IT staff are not spending time trying to satisfy a small percentage of the user population. By knowing and then focusing on the more VDI appropriate desktops first, the IT staff is more productive and VDI ROI is achieved in record time.

This data can then be used for design of the virtual desktop infrastructure and Stratusphere Fit, automates that process as well. For example it provides insight into which VDI components should be on SSD, which on fast disk and which can be on inexpensive capacity storage.

Once the best VDI candidates are identified, then the next step is migrating those desktops. This process can take hours or even days to move all of the user desktop personalization settings and documents to the virtual environment. ProfileUnity automates this process. In addition to migration ProfileUnity can automate routine desktop management tasks such as creating application shortcuts, mapping drives, installing printers, and configuring Outlook MAPI profiles. It also eases the management of application streaming products like VMware ThinApp. Finally it can even be used to sync virtual desktops like laptops that may be off line at times after the initial migration to VDI.

The last piece of the VDI puzzle is managing the user experience day to day. The challenge with VDI is who is responsible for managing user environments that used to be on separate desktops and is now running on server hardware? Stratusphere UX performs detailed reporting and analysis of historical and real-time user experience metrics to provide user experience management for the entire VDI environment. With this reporting in place IT can analyze user and application workload, including the network, storage, and hypervisor layers. This solution can then alert the proper support team when user experience is in a negative trend or is compromised.

Storage Swiss Take

VDI is often looked at as a more riskier leap than server virtualization. There are many more users than there are servers and they often complain much louder when things go wrong. Like the applications, users are used to having their own hardware but are not even using 1% of its capabilities. There is ROI to be had in VDI but success in VDI starts with knowing what desktops to virtualize and then having tools in place that will help you manage and monitor the user experience. The Liquidware Labs family of products provides coverage in each of these critical areas.