How to size your infrastructure to optimize your end user experience

[cassandrarowe]

Embarking on a desktop virtualization project can be daunting for the uninitiated. With so many unique vendors and requirements to navigate, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is like a separate world unto itself. Even seasoned experts will discover unique challenges with each project. One of the most critical things to get right is to size your infrastructure to ensure a great user experience, without killing your budget by overprovisioning. 

It’s important first to stress just how important a great user experience is to the success of a VDI project. It’s often the #1 reason VDI projects fail. User experience is a product of many factors. First and foremost, the infrastructure that you choose to host your virtual desktops will make the biggest impact on performance, regardless of which virtualization app you plan to run. HPE SimpliVity prides itself on being unmatched in the performance category among hyperconverged offerings. 

But even the best infrastructures need to be sized appropriately to meet the needs of your end users. The catch is, sizing for virtual desktops is a lot harder than sizing for servers. Here’s what VDI guru and TechTarget contributor Gabe Knuth said about sizing at the 2015 TechTarget Boston Roadshow:

“Where servers are predictable, desktops are random. Sizing a VDI environment with this kind of randomness means people can get stuck in the design phase, but most often they get stuck in the deployment phase. They try a small number of users, think they have it figured out, [and] then realize the limitations of their hosts and storage when they try to scale up.”

A number of factors go into sizing infrastructure for VDI deployments. Chief among these are the number of users supported and the use cases involved. In all cases, the use of VDI assessment tools can ease the process greatly. Using desktop assessment tools, like those provided by Lakeside Software, the current utilization of desktops can be quantified and used to properly size the VDI environment.

Lakeside Software is a leader in workspace analytics for IT and a HPE technology partner. The Lakeside SysTrack Desktop Assessment is a simple discovery tool that provides deep insight and meaningful recommendations. SysTrack applies an automation model to dramatically reduce the complexity and risk involved with VDI, and helps get projects started in the right direction. One of the biggest benefits is that SysTrack can help to identify the resource demands placed on the infrastructure, to reduce infrastructure costs and overhead by properly sizing the backend requirements.

Proper sizing of VDI workloads will greatly improve the potential of suc­cess of any VDI implementation by optimizing both the user experience and costs. Once implementation is completed and users are ready to use the system, tools like SysTrack can also help with continuous monitoring of the desktop experience to make sure users remain happy and IT stays on top of any potential issues.

For more information on the newly evolved HPE SimpliVity solution, click here.

 Cassandra

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