Final Insights from “Blame Wars – the VI Admin Strikes Back” – Part 3 By Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati If I had to pick one quote to summarize our “Blame Wars – the VI Admin Strikes Back” webinar – and the state of virtualization performance management today – this just might be it. You’ve migrated to virtualization and understand and are experiencing its value to some degree. But, while you’re on the right track, if you don’t keep moving forward, you won’t get your mission-critical apps on board and you will likely take the blame for numerous mishaps occurring in
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Insights from “Blame Wars – the VI Admin Strikes Back” – Part 2 By Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati So your legacy tools aren’t cutting it. Now what? How do you navigate the road ahead and successfully get your mission critical apps up and running with the performance demanded by both your users and management? With noted analyst Bernd Harzog on board with us, we covered a lot of ground in our recent webinar “Blame Wars – the VI Admin Strikes Back.” So much so that I wanted to review some of what was discussed here with you. In the first
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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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Alan Robin, CEO, Xangati The Xangati team received exciting news last week. We learned that our Xangati Management Dashboard (XMD) 4.0 won the Gold Award for Virtualization Management in the SearchServerVirtualization.com 2011 Products of the Year. Winning the top award from an independent panel of judges – including users, editorial staff, analysts and virtualization experts – feels good. But the progress that we’re making as an industry and for users feels great. As we move forward, advancing to the next level, everything in virtualization points to progress. A recent IDC survey identifies virtualization as a top priority for CIOs in
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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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