VDI Best Practices

Presenters Roy Francis (FusionStorm) Bala Vaidhinathan (eG Innovations) Rick Ruskin (eG Innovations)

VDI Best Practices How to Ensure a Great Customer Experience When Deploying Client Virtualization

Today’s Discussion

Avoid client virtualization pitfalls

Overcome user challenges

Migration considerations

Address performance and scalability considerations

Success stories

Next steps

Roy Francis VDI Service Architect FusionStorm [email protected]

Client Virtualization: Challenges and Solutions

Client Virtualization: Top 10 Mistakes 10: Not Calculating Network Impact

– Virtual desktops require more bandwidth

– Virtual apps may not

9: No Profile Strategy

– When organizations do not properly plan the profile strategy they are asking for failure

– Especially true for Client Virtualization

8: Lack of Application Virtualization Strategy

– Primary factor that often dictates the need for additional desktop images are application sets

7: Improper Resource Allocation

– Fine line between maximizing the number of users a single server can support and providing the user with a good virtual desktop computing experience

6: Not Optimizing Antivirus

– Simply adding AV to the virtual desktop can cause severe performance issues

Client Virtualization: Top 10 Mistakes

5: Not Managing Boot Storms

– A virtual desktop startup has the single largest impact to any virtual desktop implementation

4: Ignoring Virtual Desktop Optimizations

– However, when delivering an operating system into a virtual desktop, many organizations do not go far enough to optimize the desktop for the virtualized environment

3: Not Enough Cache

– Simply adding more RAM to the Server won’t solve the problem

2: Default Settings Used on Management Server

1: Improper Storage Design

– Without a properly designed storage subsystem, a user’s virtual desktop will slow down to the point of becoming unusable because storage becomes a bottleneck

ROI Review

Savings on IT budgets, as reported by businesses that have implemented desktop virtualization and are tracking ROI.

20% How did they get there?

Performance Monitoring

What does that mean? First, not all customers have performance monitoring in their environment – but those that do; ~70% of the savings in IT budgets was created and reported through proper performance

monitoring and management.

~70% Most of the Top-10 mistakes made couldn’t have been reported without proper performance monitoring in place.

Best Practices

Recommended Process Approach a CV project like any other major project

Assess

•Understand Business & End-User Requirements

•Identify investment requirements

Conduct POC

•Validate the technology

•Ensure feature/functionality exists

Plan

•Define Architecture

•Define staffing and education requirements

•Define Support plan

Design

•Develop detailed design and operational plans

•Develop support plan

Pilot

•Migrate users in Target Pilot Group

•Conduct multiple pilots to validate solution readiness

Implement

•Roll-out to Target Users

Manage & Support

•Manage and Monitor user experience through best of breed tools

•Support end users through proper help desk training and incident management & response

Most customers skip these key steps and

move directly to a pilot.

What to Expect from the Roadmap Design?

Understand Desktop Virtualization Solutions

Infrastructure Costs

Application Integration & User Workspace Design

Security Policies on what users can do

Single Desktop Image Design

Is Application Streaming viable?

What else in the user environment needs to be controlled, managed and automated?

Validated Networking Design

Core Switching and Routing

Advanced Networking Components o Application Load Balancing

o Site Load Balancing

o Branch Site WAN Optimization

o Datacenter WAN Optimization

What We Hear in the Field

“Client Virtualization is just like Server Virtualization” – Beyond the possibility of using a server virtualization

platform, this is a whole different ballgame

“You can use your existing desktop licenses

for virtual desktop deployment” – If you have Software Assurance, VDA is a benefit – If you don’t have SA, VDA is $100/device/year

(subscription based on licensing agreement)

“VDI can be rolled out in a month”

– Most organizations take 6-12 months to assess, plan, design and pilot their solution

What We Hear In The Field “Presentation Virtualization or Terminal Services is

‘old school’ technology” – We continue to see customers adopt Microsoft RDS and Citrix

XenApp since it is mature and proven technology. – CDW has deployed 5,000 seats of XenApp 6 + NetScaler

“There is no ROI in Client Virtualization technology” – This is actually somewhat true. Calculating an accurate ROI

first requires starting with an accurate TCO; something which is fairly difficult to calculate. This should include: • Desktop refresh costs • Desktop OS costs (including SA) • Help Desk/Service Desk costs • Desktop/Application administrative and break/fix personnel

costs

– A Client Virtualization solution, just like Server Virtualization requires significant upfront investments, but due to the lack of major power/cooling benefits, the ROI takes longer to achieve, and is usually 3-6 years out.

VDI Performance Pain

50% of all desktop

virtualization projects

stall or fail for 2 reasons:

1) Unacceptable End User Performance

2) Cost Overruns

“Traditional management tools and desktop assessments are failing to

deliver VDI performance, user acceptance and scalability.”

Audience Poll

What is your biggest client virtualization pain?

– User experience / performance

– Cost control / ROI

– Deployment complexity

– Lack of client virtualization management tools

– Client virtualization expertise

VDI Best Practices

Bala Vaidhinathan CTO eG Innovations [email protected]

VDI Performance Assurance

Virtualization

Desktop

Brokers and

Support Systems

Performance management for VDI is

extremely unique as you need a solution that combines multiple

different performance management

methodologies

VDI

Monitor VDI Service,

not Silos

Deep

Visibility into

Sessions


Right-Size for Great

ROI

Monitor Users,

Not Just VMs

Preemptive Detection & Alerting


not Silos

Deep

Visibility into

Sessions


ROI

Monitor Users,

Not Just VMs



VDI is slow

VDI is not

working

VDI freezes

often

Users care about the “service”

The CPU usage of

the VMware servers

is ok.

The DNS servers are

responding well to

queries.

IT operations teams focus on infrastructure silos

This disconnect is a threat to the success of transformational IT initiatives & the promise of agility, scalability, and cost savings!

The User / IT Management Disconnect

Monitor

VDI Service, not Silos

Monitor the VDI Service, Not Silos

Know when

user access is slowing

Monitor


Monitor the VDI Service, Not Silos

Get 360o Visibility

Know which tiers are working and which are not.

Monitor


Virtual Server Monitoring Solutions cannot give you 360o visibility. They focus on the virtualization platform only.

Monitor Every Layer, Every Tier

The VMs looks fine. vCenter does not show any alert.

There is an alert indicating an issue within the virtual

desktop.

The hypervisor looks fine.

Monitor


Monitor Every Layer, Every Tier

Oops – there is 26% retransmission from the virtual desktop

Monitor


Automatic Root-Cause Diagnosis

Root-cause

The effect of the problem

Deep visibility into every layer, every tier, & service-based correlation enable rapid/accurate diagnosis of performance issues.

Monitor



not Silos

Deep

Visibility into

Sessions



ROI

Monitor Users,

Not Just VMs


Know usage patterns and trends for effective capacity planning and load distribution.

Plan Based on Usage Report

Top users, Top applications


ROI

Get More Out of Your Investment

Track user sessions on each server


ROI

A few of the servers are handling most of

the sessions


ROI

Know How to Invest Widely

Find your VDI bottlenecks


not Silos

Deep

Visibility into

Sessions



ROI

Monitor Users,

Not Just VMs



Broad Coverage Deep Insights

- LUN queue length

- VM CPU Ready

- TCP Retransmissions

- Memory leaks

- Profile sizes

Virtual

Physical Cloud

Storage Application

Network

Database

Virtualization

It is important to have the right metrics

Look for domain expertise in VDI, collect the right metrics. Otherwise, it will be a case of “Garbage in, Garbage out”!


Preemptive detection & alerting lets administrators see and fix problems before users notice

Auto-Baseline Key Metrics

• Auto-compute time-of-day baselines

• Alert administrators when metrics violate baselines



The domain server goes down, pulling down the VDI service. Why?

Event history provides a clue …

A Preemptive Alerting Example Real-World Scenario

The domain server has failed

and rebooted.

5 hours earlier, a pro-active alert about

memory leak!


not Silos

Deep

Visibility into

Sessions



ROI

Monitor Users,

Not Just VMs


Monitor Users, Not Just VMs

• Workload of the VM is user-dependent

• When a user complains, need to know which physical server and VM they are on

• Need to know who the top users are for capacity planning

• User information required for billing, capacity planning

Poor user experience impacts VDI success. So focus on monitoring users, not just VMs!

Monitor

Users, not just VMs


Know which ESX/Xen server he/she is logged on to

Monitor

Users, not just VMs

When a user calls, search for the user


See all the other users logged on to the same

ESX/Xen host.

See performance issues at the user level so you can fix and right-size your VDI environment for user satisfaction.

Monitor

Users, not just VMs


not Silos

Deep

Visibility into

Sessions



ROI

Monitor Users,

Not Just VMs


Deep Visibility Into Sessions

CPU usage inside a

virtual desktop is high

Deep

Visibility into

Sessions

Deep Visibility Into Sessions

The top CPU process is Windows Media Player. The user is watching a

movie

Deep

Visibility into

Sessions

Accelerate problem resolution by understanding why a VM is consuming resources.

Monitor VDI

Service, not Silos

Deep

Visibility into

Sessions



ROI

Monitor Users,

Not Just VMs


“Dramatically simplify and accelerate VDI performance

management. Deliver peak performance, user satisfaction and ROI.”

VDI Performance Assurance Benefits

VDI Performance

Assurance

IT Productivity

Higher service uptime

Simplicity

User Satisfaction

Cost control & ROI

Delivering Great Customer Experiences Success Stories

Rick Ruskin Vice President Sales eG Innovations [email protected]

Leading Financial Software Vendor Boosts VDI Scalability and ROI

Challenge: VDI Scalability

– 15,000 Citrix VDI users experienced declining user productivity due to application performance issues (“slow applications”)

– Legacy tools ineffective in diagnosing problem

Solution: eG Performance Management

– Rapid resolution of performance issues minimizes downtime and user frustration

– Automate diagnosis, remove guesswork and boost IT productivity

– Efficient analytics remove bottlenecks to scalability

– Eliminate unnecessary resource expenditures and boost ROI

Major Hospital Chain Virtualizes Citrix XenApp

Challenge: Virtualizing XenApp for the first time – No visibility to see and assess performance problems

– In reality “other” VM’s were consuming the resources allocated to the Hypervisor (not Citrix XenApp)

Solution: eG Performance Management – Correlate views between the Hypervisor (ESX) and XenApp to

uncover the real cause of slow performance

– Deep visibility into XenApp user profiles enable higher VM density and better hardware utilization

– Achieve 25% more users per server and significant cost savings across the infrastructure

Major Media & Cable Company Gets Performance Assurance

Challenge: How to scale from ZERO to 10,000 VDI users in less than one year

– Requires VDI performance platform that instantaneously shows root cause and remediates issues quickly, before users are impacted

Solution: eG Performance Management – Immediate visibility to the root cause of user experience issues

– Real-time identification of database, application, and network challenges

– VDI user scale out proceeds seamlessly

Big System Integrator Solves Tough Performance Problem

Challenge: Worldwide VDI user performance is inconsistent across regions

– Extreme latency assumed to be a network problem

– Significant money spent to build up the network bandwidth…yet problems persisted

Solution: eG Performance Management – Identify conflicts between virtual desktops that consume large

resources across different times of the day

– Quickly find root cause of issue by correlating between the users, applications, VDI sessions, and infrastructure

&

Next Steps

More Details www.fusionstorm.com www.eginnovations.com

Call Us FusionStorm +1 800-228-TECH

eG Innovations (US) +1 732-794-1259

http://www.fusionstorm.com/

http://www.eginnovations.com/

Technology

VDI Best Practices