BYOD
A
reduction in required remote administration skills - Desktop virtualisation often diminishes reliance on centralised IT or third parties to support the administration of physical desktops. Support for the remote mobile worker - Tablets, smartphones, or other devices owned by employees handle desktop workloads. Desktop virtualisation facilitates both mobility and collaboration in the Post-PC era mobile and dispersed workforce. IT Considerations to Ensure VDI is Enterprise Ready Designing a virtual desktop infrastructure platform for steady state performance is obviously easier than designing it for potential failures. It’s not a question of if a failure will occur, but when. And when a failure happens, what will be the impact on the company? What will be the impact be on desktop performance? How will the system manage the failure and deliver continued desktop performance? How will the system recover? Many ‘simple’ VDI solutions are just that - ‘simple’. They fail to adequately address many of the enterprise-class requirements of continuous operations during degraded infrastructure performance or even node failure. The virtual desktop infrastructure needs to be designed and implemented to seamlessly handle faults while providing continuous operations. At the other end of the scale many ‘enterprise-class’ VDI solutions are often too complex and too costly for remote and branch office operations to implement. These ‘solutions’ are custom built or custom configured to glue together separate hardware, software and virtualisation technologies into a services wrapped package. While many enterprise-scale vendors have created ‘starter’ packages that deliver an appealing initial price per desktop, consumers need to be wary of the costs associated with any changes to capacity as well as the fact that they will need to have some competent infrastructure skills on board (SAN, networking, servers), to support and maintain the infrastructure. Ability to Scale The ability to scale a VDI deployment is another critical element that requires careful consideration and planning. The goal is to be able to scale desktops smoothly and dynamically, with a linear price/performance per desktop and a linear scale out of manageability. This requires the ability to dial in a ‘converged’ scale-out model of all aspects of the virtual desktop infrastructure; virtualisation software, servers, network and shared storage. This is tricky to do since the infrastructure components are co-dependent. For example, adding more server capacity to handle additional desktops might simply require adding volumes to the shared storage system. But in the case of, say, a fiber channel SAN whose capacity was designed to tightly match the needs of an initial desktop configuration, these costs can escalate if the head end controller wasn’t specified to handle any additional IOPS requirements, or if there aren’t enough ports in the switch fabric, or if the blade enclosure is maxed out and an additional blade is required, etc. Building out linear, elastic scalability that is predictable and constant in terms of price and performance is difficult to achieve. Another important aspect to consider is the scale-out from
pilot-to-production. VDI “pilot stall” often results from the discontinuity between pilot and production architecture. As much as possible, organisations should look to piloting the infrastructure that will be used in production. Network performance Delivering desktops in a centralised model to remote or branch offices requires careful consideration of the network design and performance. Low bandwidth, high latency network connections can be disastrous to the quality of the end user experience, no matter how good the back-end infrastructure is. Failure to ensure that network performance is always optimal will result in an unacceptable user experience. Choices regarding how desktops are rendered at the endpoint can greatly impact the end user experience.
Approaches: Centralised or “Centributed” implementation to ROBO VDI The centralised model assumes that the expertise, hardware, and software infrastructure resides entirely within the confines of the data center, and that desktops are served up over the WAN. Centralisation has many advantages in terms of standardisation, skills, economies of scale, etc. It does have challenges in terms WAN performance, size, scope and complexity of project. Another approach, called “centributed,” delivers all of the benefits of a centralised model, and is simple, scalable and affordable enough to deploy locally. This approach employs a pre-configured appliance model to deliver an enterprise-ready plug-andplay building block approach to virtualising desktops in the BYOD era. In summary, with the growing trend of BYOD only increasing, IT needs a solution to ensure workforce accessibility while maintaining security. As IT shows a growing interest in VDI as a solution to BYOD ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????e??????????????????%P??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????((???????????????????????????((