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David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati
With TV shows about emergency room doctors, police detectives, advertisers, lawyers, and broadcasters—just to name a few—Hollywood has yet to produce one centered on IT. With the transformation of the data center, the timing is ripe for a sitcom on the VDI administrator. Xangati has seen some things in the VDI that are harder to believe than something you could invent—proving once again that fact is stranger than fiction.
Consider the following ‘VDI’ components:
You’ve got conflict through a seismic disruption. You’re being asked to implement and manage secure user access to mission critical business applications across entirely new delivery platforms and to a myriad of emerging end user devices that are changing not only the way that we work but also how we live—blurring professional and personal boundaries.
You’ve got a diverse cast of characters. Management is drooling with anticipation of a new technology that offers improved business productivity and operational efficiencies and wants to have it all happen today. Network and storage teams are happily pointing the finger at virtualization—and you—anytime something goes wrong. Meanwhile, end users are demanding access to all corporate applications through devices that include tablets, laptops and even smartphones. When their expectations aren’t met, you’re the one whose reputation takes the hit!
After making a significant investment of both time and resources, one unnamed corporation rolled out its VDI implementation to 600 users—only to meet with persistent problems that plagued the user experience. With an imminent deadline to migrate another 600 users, IT simply could not identify the problem with its existing tools.
Enter the protagonist. After deploying the Xangati solution, the VDI team could immediately see that they had a bandwidth hog—a single user taking 20 percent of the bandwidth—as well as a dozen other outliers.
Without the ability to have a comprehensive, concentrated look at all aspects that make up the VDI environment, infrastructure issues like this can and will impact the VDI user experience.
If you can’t ID the top talker on the WAN, you won’t be able to figure out who is causing the network congestion resulting in a latency issue. We’ve seen VDI administrators baffled by what’s causing congestion in the WAN pipe. When we’ve come in, we can quickly see that shared file stores have been mistakenly set-up to run back-ups in the middle of the day—a performance issue that can be quickly and easily resolved.
Xangati has seen off-shore developers affected by extreme multi-hop latency issues that were not readily being tracked. Xangati can quickly isolate which network hop is causing the undesirable delay and also provides the visibility to see if it’s on the corporate network, or the Internet cloud.
Our development of the Xangati VDI Dashboard is a direct result of the things that we’ve seen in actual VDI implementations. We have seen the absolute need for a performance management solution that can frame all VDI operations—both in and outside of the VI—for the VDI team. And we’ve seen the critical need for continuous and real-time monitoring—because everything that can impact the VDI must be in tip top health in order to deliver an optimal end-user experience.
The Xangati VDI Dashboard features a Performance Health Engine that allows VI administrators to monitor in real-time the status of every single component that impacts the VDI end user experience. When an anomaly of any type occurs, the system sends out an alert, so that you can visually see what’s happening. Further, these alerts show you the exact element impacted, the time of the incident, how long it lasted and what was going on when it occurred.
As one of our valued customers—Art King at NIKE—put it, “It is not viable to make a bare bones VDI environment and then wait for the first crisis to get funding to add other necessary framework components…We think that our organization wants us to rollout VDI and have much of the infrastructure/processes in-place on DAY ONE to provide a good experience.”
Xangati thinks so, too! Do you have three minutes? Check out our YouTube introduction to the Xangati VDI Dashboard to hear more and get a look at the Performance Health Engineyourself.
And—please—let us know what you think! This show is about you, after all and you can start by choosing who you think would be the perfect lead in a VDI series in the poll below.
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