Five Tips for Your Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Deployment—Tip #2

David Messina, VP Marketing and Product Management, Xangati

In the last blog post, I focused on the fact that the virtual desktop is (in essence) a composite of multiple components linked together over the network. Therefore, as a logical follow-up, this post is dedicated to the need to [Tip #2] Understand the Network Requirements for VDI.

I can’t underscore enough the importance of the network—given that in the many stalled pilots that we have encountered, one of the recurring themes is a general lack of awareness about the network’s role in the deployment of VDI.

For example, we see a number of pilots get off the ground initially with the IT staff playing the role of the end-user. This part of the project almost always goes smoothly given the substantial amount of bandwidth within the headquarters’ LAN that IT is sitting on. However, the dynamics that are not looked into early enough are with respect to the WAN and for VPN users. The access speeds in these environments are considerably less than the LAN and therefore, in our experience, it is prudent to make sure that early pilots blend end-users accessing their desktops from the LAN, WAN and VPN.

In addition, one should take into account that the different desktop presentation protocols—RDP, HDX/ICA and PCoIP—each have latency ceilings at which point an end-user’s desktop experience will begin to significantly degrade. Therefore, it is essential to have a dialogue with the VDI vendors to assess how their latency requirements will map to your specific infrastructure. There are a number of cases that the end-user experience for VDI is more sensitive than with VoIP.

And finally, it is of paramount importance to understand the network workload (aka bandwidth needs) of the various VDI display protocol options out there. It is also critical that you get very specific in network workload analysis and look at the complete range of applications you expect your users to leverage. Excel spreadsheets are not voracious users of bandwidth, but 3-dimensional CAD drawings are. These distinctions in graphical presentation make all the difference now that it is, in effect, the image presentation as the “application” traversing the network. Also in this regard, you want to try to understand the network workload in terms of the actual peaks versus weighted averages. The reason being is that the WAN has to have sufficient capacity to handle any surges; or, networking equipment has to be leveraged to mitigate the effect.

Continue to Tip #3: Assess WAN Readiness.

And remember to follow @XangatiPress on Twitter to catch all five related tips and participate in the surrounding discussion.

Comments

[PC tech support]

It is a completely different technology with entirely different ramifications than VDI which abstracts the desktop operating system from the underlying hardware.

[e-elite.co.kr]

Thanks for sharing your info. I really appreciate your efforts and I am waiting for your next write ups thank you once again.

[ppf shipping]

Very good blog you have here but I was curious if you knew of any user discussion forums that cover the same topics talked about in this article? I'd really like to be a part of group where I can get feed-back from other experienced individuals that share the same interest. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Kudos!