Many large enterprises have deployed Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for thousands of users across their organizations with an intent to transform their workspace. However, there are many challenges that they face in managing the environment.
Enterprises have to right-size the VDI and apps to match user persona, identify the right approach/tools for application assessment, and benchmark performance of VDIs against PCs and laptops. They also have to ensure application OS and desktop OS lifecycle management that involves functional and load testing of new business-critical applications, ensuring application compatibility and remediation during tech refresh, handling Windows OS version updates, etc. A key imperative is to ensure synchronization between application and desktop OS lifecycles to avoid siloed upgrades. On the infrastructure aspect, enterprises have to deal with issues in service availability, capacity planning, performance, vendor coordination, VDI health and user experience management. They also have to be on the top of desktop and application delivery aspects to avert basic operational issues (related to login, desktop/app icons, etc.) and longer provision cycles.
This paper provides a point of view on VDI maturity journey and best practices that help in this transformation.
VDI is complex
VDI environment is a composite mix of many technology layers, typically consisting of at least 10 layers (See Figure 1). VDI IT admin have to deal with all these technologies and ensure that they fit together well in delivering a decent desktop experience for the end users. Apart from the native VDI layers, the supporting ecosystem layers (AD, DNS, DHCP, license management, patch management, AV management, configuration management) make the scenario more complex.
Figure 1: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure layers
As the desktop delivery environment spans across multiple layers, services and components, monitoring and management in silos will not help identify problems and root causes. When a problem occurs, it is unclear what caused the problem: was it network? application? database? server? brokering services? storage system?
Siloed monitoring systems and teams often lead to blame games and passing of issues from one to the other, without actually resolving the problem in time.
In the VDI environment, it is important to have a common dashboard from where the entire infrastructure can be monitored and diagnosed. (Table 1) lists the important points that need to be considered while managing VDI environments.
Table 1: Important considerations in managing VDI environment
Towards VDI maturity
To leapfrog the journey of VDI, maturity of monitoring and automation need to be enhanced multifold. Smart integration of user experience monitoring, machine learning-driven root cause identification, self-heal automation and prescriptive analytics drives VDI into the autopilot mode.
In the journey to achieve autopilot stage in desktop delivery service, we need to master the activities at various stages (See Figure 2).
Figure 2: VDI maturity journey milestones
To make system self-sustainable, we need to impart and build various self-managed characteristics into the system management layer. The key ones can be classified as,
An autonomous VDI framework needs to be designed from the ground up with all these ingredients. Monitoring should be built with a strong focus on end-user experience. Infrastructure and site monitoring should be correlated with user experience and improvised actions need to be proposed. Automation engines should be built to trigger self-heal activities to identify and eliminate glitches that affect end-user experience negatively. In addition, run book automation will relieve admins from having to perform mundane daily tasks.
A view of various modes of data collection is highlighted in (Table 2). Proactive-Active monitoring needs to be established for delivery assurance.
Table 2: Data monitoring strategies
Figure 3: VDI management Stack
Four pillars of the virtual desktop delivery assurance framework
The VDI autonomous framework consists of four pillars:
Conclusion
VDI solutions offer tremendous benefits to organizations in terms of manageability, performance, security, and other benefits. However, if proper planning and care is not taken, VDI engagements may lead to frustration for all stakeholders. It can result in bad end-user experiences, high maintenance costs, unpredictable and unreliable service, and IT team frustration. By proper planning, engaging right framework/tools, and adapting best practices, organizations will achieve successful, effective, and problem-free VDI deployments.
Narasimha Sekhar
Practice Director, Cloud & Infrastructure Services, Wipro Limited.
Sekhar has 24 years of experience in product development for telecommunication, manufacturing, information technology, and technical delivery. He specializes in the field of virtual desktops, cloud, software defined solutions, and is currently part of the end user computing practice globally. He is the principal architect for VirtuaDesk, Wipro’s IP solution in the field of desktop as a service and also a senior member of the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS) programme at Wipro. Sekhar can be reached at sekhar.kakaraparthi@wipro.com