My First 1000 Virtual Desktops: A Color-By-Numbers Guide to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

I am going to start this article off by first going over what I don't know (and believe you me, the list is long).  I have been drinking and pouring the VDI Kool-Aid for quite some time, and thought I would pen my thoughts on how to get to your first 1,000 virtual desktops in a way that is as simple as coloring by numbers.

You can spend hours of effort looking as spreadsheets, combing through asset inventory, trying to collect perfmon and network stats...or you can let software do this for you.

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination." 

So, what don't I know:

• I don't know if we will ever solve this nagging speed-of-light issue that seems to be a major source of toil and consternation in regards to remote computing (although quantum entanglement looks promising).

• I don't know if physical PCs or virtual ones are right for you.

• I don't know if VDI, Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD), Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), Terminal Services, Client Hypervisors (CHVs), or some new, yet to be named three-letter acronym (TLA) is the best solution for your environment.

• And, I don't know what it will cost you.

What I do know is that virtualization, applied correctly, can be as powerful as the migration we made from the typewriter to the desktop.  It is that big.

So, where do we begin? While there may be a million answers to this question, the intent of this article is simplicity.  I promised you a color-by-numbers guide. So, all I want to know are three simple things:

1.      What do you have

2.      What do you use, and

3.      What do you need.

If you have the ability to know these things, you can inventory, interrogate, and analyze this data, in software, to make logical decisions about what your first steps should be.

What you have:

Now, here is where the complexity begins. What you have is the sum total of everything in your desktop environment - users, systems, configurations, policies, networks, applications, locations, monitors, ports, protocols, etc. Now, it is highly unlikely that we all keep a list of everything in our environments, in real time, all the time. Thankfully there are now solutions in the market that allow you to do this - query, log, and inventory every element within your desktop populations, at a point in time, or over any period of time, all aggregated in one report.

What you use: