VDI's Top 5 Prerequisites...okay maybe 4 - Looking for Feedback Please!


Michael Mills


Formerly the VP of Professional Services for a Citrix VAR in Chicago, IL for the past 10 years, I now spend my time helping organizations successfully implement Desktop Virtualization strategies as the Principal Solutions Consultant at AppSense. After almost 15 years as a Citrix and server virtualization architect, during which time I had the opportunity to help many Fortune 500 organizations with their Citrix architecture and implementations, I have chosen to focus on Desktop Virtualization/Cloud solutions.

In my personal time, when not totally being a techie and immersing myself in new gadgets, I am an avid motorsports fan and professional cross county motocross racer. If not in front of the computer, you will find me in my garage working on one of several “projects”.

I hope you like my articles, but if you don’t….well I suppose that will give us something to talk about wont it, after all what fun is life without a bit on conflict!!
Posted Tuesday, January 12, 2010 by Michael Mills | 2 Comments | 1335 views

Tags:  Desktop Virtualization News |  VMWare News |  All Articles

What do you need to do before you deploy a desktop virtualization solution?

Having had the opportunity to architect a few VDI, desktop virtualization, alternative desktop (or whatever you choose to call it) solutions over the last few years, I thought I would put together a list of the top things that need to be done in order to be successful with a VDI rollout.  Note: I am assuming that business justification and need has already been established.

I also want to point out that the purpose of this article is to get everyone’s feedback so that a “community reviewed” best practices approach might be established.  For the focus of this first article, I want to talk about the prerequisites, those things that need to be accomplished before you ever start turning a wrench.  It goes without saying that, akin to buying a Subway franchise where location, location, location is the first business rule, desktop virtualization’s first rule should be plan, plan, plan.  That being said, here are a few that have jumped up and bitten more than a few of my projects.

·         Complete list of all applications that your users are using.  I am not talking about the applications that the company thinks the users are using, rather the complete list of all applications.  I put this first because this is where I see companies make mistakes all the time.  They pilot their desktop virtualization solutions and use MS Office, Adobe, some ERP package, VIOP package and that’s it.  They forget about all the little applications that make up a bulk of users’ productivity and workflow.  If desktop virtualization is defined as “the separation of an OS from a physical desktop, and a separation of the apps from the OS, and the separation of the user state from the Applications and OS,” how is your organization going to accomplish that without fully understanding what the users are using today and how they are using it?
·         Accurate picture of physical desktop computing requirements A.K.A Sizing.  This almost goes hand-in-hand with knowing all the applications.  If you forget to put that statistics application that your finance user requires in your pilot, then you likely missed out on a huge chunk of CPU usage.  Likewise, if you left out a development app that your developers require, then you may have missed out on CPU, memory and disk space requirements.  The bottom line, desktop virtualization is not much different than server virtualization when it comes to calculating sizing requirements.  If you don’t know the environment that you are coming from there is no way you can plan the environment that you are going to.  Note: This one always gets me charged. I can’t tell you how many times I would be invited by a customer to help them with a desktop virtualization design only to have them tell me after-the-fact that they had already purchased the hardware.  Imagine their faces when I told them that the hardware that they prepurchased was either inadequate or excessive of what they really needed.  “Sure that 10Gig fiber link will work real well against the $100 SAN you just bought.”
·         Snapshot of user state.  I am not sure what I want to call this so for now I will call it “user state.”  Anytime you perform a migration that involves user-generated data and settings you have to be careful to ensure the smooth transition of the user information or else, no matter how well you architected, completed the project ahead of schedule, etc, your project will fail.  Ask anyone that has done a desktop/laptop lease turn in and they will tell you how important this step is.  Moving your organization from physical desktops to virtual ones will have the same challenges. I mean in the simplest definition we are in fact doing a desktop replacement.  Make sure in your pilots that you account for the migration of your user’s “state.” 
·         Operations Plan.  Imagine you moved from the home you have now, that has a modest 65’x120’ lawn, to a home that has 8 acres of lawn.  Now imagine trying to mow that 8 acres with your little 22” craftsman mower that had served you well all those years.  I don’t think it would take you long to figure out that you needed a new mower, but what if you didn’t budget for the $6000 tractor that you will now need to buy, or the new plow, or the fertilizer, or, or, or…  I make this point because with the advent of desktop virtualization, companies are rushing forward on their pilots, deciding on and deploying this technology, and most are not giving any thought as to how it will be maintained.  Backups, patching, AV updates, whether or not to use AV, infrastructure upgrades, change control processes, etc.  All this will likely change, and in some ways dramatically, from the way your organization has done things before.  How many “golden images” do you need to keep on hand?  How will you roll back in an outage?  How will you apply rolling upgrades to your XenApp farm if all XenApp servers are using the same “golden image?”  How will you roll our new applications?  Or how about a nontechnical one, how will you allocate budget for refreshes with this new technology?  With physical desktops most organizations just said take the number of physical PC’s and divide by 3, 4 or 5, and we will budget for and replace that amount each year.  How will your organization ensure that you are budgeting properly for those refreshes now?  Storage, servers, endpoints, etc?  Make sure that your pilot includes these things as well.  Ensure that the pilot doesn’t just test the technology but tests how it will ACTUALLY work in your live environment.  Nothing worse than promising to the business organization and users that this newfangled thing is going to be better, if the first time it goes down we can’t recover from it.
Now I know that this list isn’t exhaustive, and there are a TON of technical “things” that need to be done prior to rollout but I wanted to focus on the ones that needed to happen before you even picked up a wrench.  I would be interested to hear what other things I may have missed or where I may have gotten it right.

Comments


Eric S. Perkins on Wednesday, January 13, 2010 says

Mr Mills...

Nice write up. I guess here are some important things that would need to be determined before a "wrench" is picked up.

1. Set Expectations properly, with our history we both know how critical this was in SBC environments.
2. Security design considerations. If the endpoint location is moved, things like web filtering need to be reviewed etc..
3. DR Plans... While on the surface one might say VDI improves DR, this might be true but if not planned for it might be detrimental especially if employees had locally installed apps on laptops and could have functioned offline.
4. Connectivity to users. Remote or satelite offices need to be considered, and the quality of the connection needs looking at.


Anyway just some points to consider adding to your list! Nice work!

-ESP
Michael Mills on Wednesday, January 13, 2010 says

Thanks Eric - Security is for sure in the Top 5, thoguh not written specifically i had considered DR to be part of Ops Plan, but as you mentioned it should be pointed out.

Thank you for the comments!!