The New Mindset That Is VDI

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

Last month I took a business trip to Europe – where I was able to spend a lot of time talking with customers about their virtualization initiatives. Many of the conversations centered on VDI. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, much of what I heard was also reflected at a recent Gartner Data Center Conference. 

Gartner analyst Terry Cosgrove has stated that Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD) – Gartner’s term for VDI – is trading a configuration management challenge for a performance challenge. From my numerous customer exchanges, I believe that companies are really starting to grasp the meaning of that statement – primarily because they’re experience it themselves in their own deployments. 

For example, a leading global insurance company has already rolled out VDI to about 1200 desktops, and the division’s management team wants to nearly double that figure. But IT is already drowning with end user performance issues as it is and doesn’t even have the ability to ensure success for the 1200 it already has place! Another systems integrator wants to deliver VDI from the cloud, but they’re stymied as to how they can actually create an operational VDI solution – without the right support to make it all work seamlessly.

VDI is a complex and dynamic infrastructure – adding new management layers that IT has never dealt with before. You are suddenly dealing with hundreds of thousands of elements – both physical and virtual – in a continuous state of flux where one false move can impact the other.

In implementing VDI, two urgent requirements stand out above others:

1. Organizations need greater understanding about how infrastructure elements (network, server, storage, desktops, applications) affect the VDI; and
2. Domain barriers must come down.

1. Organizations need understanding about all infrastructure elements.

Organizations need to see and understand how infrastructure elements – network, server, storage, desktops and applications – affect the availability and performance of the VDI infrastructure. The continuous and dynamic interplay in VDI requires a management approach that is comprehensively cross silo. In order to have actionable context for problem solving, IT must be able to view and correlate cross-silo data.

Yet administrators frequently don’t have expertise in all functional areas. Therefore, management solutions must make troubleshooting as simple as possible and conveyed in a way that is easily understandable. For example, Xangati’s Performance Health Engine creates baseline profiles that are continuously compared against real-time feeds and automatically – and visually – alerts administrators to anomalies occurring in any silo.

2. Domain barriers must come down.

The industry is not only recognizing the necessity of the aforementioned cross-silo insights but also gaining a greater understanding that everything involved in VDI demands an integrated, truly cross-functional perspective. Whereas in the past, PCs were managed as ‘components’ on a one-to-one basis; in VDI, they need to be viewed as part of an overall end-to-end service.

Gartner’s reference to domain barriers applies to the old barriers existing between the data center and the desktop. With these barriers removed, all processes are managed in the data center. Subsequently, management must move from a reactive approach to delivering a much more proactive and continuous IT service. A different mindset is needed in order to deliver an end-to-end service and manage the constant availability of each PC.

And what Xangati has long held true – and what we’re seeing and hearing reiterated by organizations such as Gartner – is that a new performance management model has to be part and parcel of the VDI solution. According to consultancy firm Entelechy Associates (SearchVirtualDesktop December 22, 2011), more VDI licenses will probably be sold in 2012 than have been sold in all other years combined. Performance management will be critical to ensure the end user satisfaction – and the ultimate success – of these deployments.