Insights from “Blame Wars – the VI Admin Strikes Back” – Part 1 By Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati Calling something ‘worse than useless’ gets your attention. And when it’s being said by noted analyst Bernd Harzog of The Virtualization Practice, it gets it doubly so. In our recent webinar, “Blame Wars – the VI Admin Strikes Back,” Xangati was lucky to have Bernd’s participation. With a huge amount of valuable info shared in the webinar, I want to repeat some of the discussion here in case you missed it. At this point, you’ve already enjoyed the initial benefits of virtualization
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Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati Be especially careful about anti-virus as you go through your deployments. The thing that happens is when you take a user’s disk and remove it from the machine and put their storage on a SAN, most traditional anti-virus products are not aware of that transition. And, many of them are used to making near constant access to the disk. And when that happens on a shared SAN environment with hundreds of desktops sitting on that SAN, performance bottlenecks spring up all over the place. Happily, most of the anti-virus products on the market
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Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati Our fifth tip talks about the need to have capability that looks across the silos and enables you to be proactive in management. When we look at these interactions, it’s important that we don’t just look at them one at a time – that is that a particular desktop is talking to a particular user and using 150K of bandwidth – it’s also important to know at the same point in time what usage level is going to the storage. What is the use of different application ports and protocols that may be
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Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati As we’re talking about end user experience, this fourth tip is going to get directly at what’s necessary to keep track of end user performance. There’s no better way to track that than to record exactly what’s happening for a particular user at the exact time that they are having a problem. This is so important because it’s ultimately the end users who determine whether or not a VDI project will succeed. Because the users are now depending on this shared infrastructure to do their job, if there’s any problem with it, they
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Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati Today’s third tip really talks about the network activity of the VDI session. This ends up being particularly important because in VDI, we’ve actually decomposed the desktop into several different constituent parts. What we’ve done in VDI is essentially taken a desktop and split it in between a screen display, the backend processing, and the storage for that desktop. These items are typically separated by a network and when you do that, the workload of the network becomes a critical part of the actual end user experience. It becomes important to be able
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Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati As we’ve been pulled in to help with dozens and dozens of VDI deployments at various stages of success, stall, or even failure – we’ve again and again found that storage performance has an outsized impact on VDI performance. In fact, the majority of deployments end up suffering from storage performance fluctuation. For example, if you were to take a particular group of VDI desktops that live on posts or are connected to storage, they all make their connections as users in deployment in the environment, and things are working along just fine.
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Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati It is essential for you to track all the moving parts in a VDI environment. It’s not enough to just look at the hypervisor or just look at the storage or even just look at the separate management console. It is crucial to have the ability to track all of those moving parts together. The Gartner Group have basically made the observation that in VDI you essentially need to combine: network, storage, servers, the guest VMs, and various other existing IT products and the problem could be anywhere when the end user has
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Nathanael Iversen, Director of Technical Marketing, Xangati Over the course of the next ten days or so, I will share various VDI tips based on my experience as the Technical Marketing Director at Xangati. I have worked with many customers on their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments (including VMware’s VMworld team on the Hands on Labs VDI) and have seen firsthand how critical management solutions are to the success of the initiative. These blog posts will provide insightful information with special focus on: Top 5 tips for an optimal end-user experience Complexity of tracking all the “moving parts” in a
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Jagan Jagannathan, Founder and CTO, Xangati You’ve heard us talk at length about how Xangati solutions help drive virtualization initiatives, giving the confidence to migrate LOB applications and extend virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiatives. With the clarity provided through our VI and VDI solutions, administrators can take the next step in data center virtualization – whatever that step might be for their particular business. They can do so confidently, knowing that our state-of-the-art monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities allow them to quickly identify and resolve performance issues. Successful virtualization means that businesses can fully capitalize their technology investment – which often
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Steve Rodgers, Marketing Communications Manager, Xangati Euclid Insurance, located in Itasca, Illinois, knows how important customer service is when growing a business. For almost 60 years, Euclid has been providing brokerage services, employee benefits, retirement programs and property and casualty insurance coverage for companies of all sizes across the U.S. and can attribute customer service to much of their longevity and success. Dan Novak, the IT Manager for Euclid, has his own set of customers to keep happy—the 140 Euclid employees that depend on his virtual and physical network. Dan’s infrastructure currently includes three ESX 4.1 servers hosting VMware View
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