A Blog Series: 5 Tips for an Optimal VDI End-User Experience

Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati

Over the course of the next ten days or so, I will share various VDI tips based on my experience as the Technical Marketing Director at Xangati. I have worked with many customers on their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments (including VMware’s VMworld team on the Hands on Labs VDI) and have seen firsthand how critical management solutions are to the success of the initiative. 

These blog posts will provide insightful information with special focus on: 

• Top 5 tips for an optimal end-user experience
• Complexity of tracking all the “moving parts” in a VDI environment
• Capturing end-user performance issues as they happen
• Analyzing your storage infrastructure performance in real-time
• Understanding the networked activity of your VDI sessions
• Establishing a cross-silo operational framework to proactively manage performance
• Details of case studies of enterprises who are leveraging these tips

To get you started, here are some of the “Smoking Guns” I've identified with our VDI customers affecting VDI user experience:

•   Storage latency fluctuations
•   AV updates bogging down desktop
•   Back-ups running in middle of day
•   Mis-configured IP storage traffic
•   DHCP servers failing intermittently
•   Outliers affecting VM density
•   Mis-configured security gateway
•   Congested WiFi network
•   YouTube clogging VPN connection
•   vSwitch introducing network latency
•   Sessions routed over too many hops
•   AV solution with architectural flaws
•   Making solution non-viable for VDI

Stay tuned for Tip #1 posting on Monday, January 16^th discussing all the moving parts in a VDI environment.