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

By Tyler Rohrer
published: Monday, July 27 2009

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:

To make logical decisions about the appropriateness of any VDI solution, and to have any chance of insuring scalability and budget viability, not to mention design criteria - you next need to know what you use in the physical world. Rules of thumb are simply not adequate.  Users are unpredictable, so design based on a static state is not meaningful. Living metrics are.

• Infrastructure - what do you have for network connectivity and what do you use, how fast/slow/reliable is it, what is your bandwidth?

• Systems - exact metrics on CPU, memory, disk drives, IOPS, monitors, USB, or other devices, and what are they doing, how much are they using?

• Users - what are their usage patterns, do you have power users among task worker groups?

• Applications - what kinds are being used, how often, by which users, where?

Now for 1,000 users, you may have hundreds - if not more - applications, machine configurations, and of course 1,000 completely different (albeit perhaps similar) usage patterns that change by the minute. This is just reality.

However, if you know exactly what you have, and exactly what you use, you actually have a darn good chance of knowing....

What you need:

Density, host, storage, network, and VM configuration becomes clear now because you are modeling a VDI solution (whichever one you choose) based on real life, and observed metrics, of YOUR users, systems, infrastructure,  applications, etc. and not using "one size fits all" specifications. This is a good thing.

Now, based on provisioning and consumption metrics AFTER you move to a VDI solution, you may need to tune some more. Perhaps you saw the ability to change application delivery methods; perhaps your users act slightly differently; perhaps you made policy changes (no more iTunes music in Fibre Channel Storage, please), etc.

Using software to quantify this, you will know - at every moment - what you have, what you are using, and therefore, what you need to do next. Computers and software are brilliantly fast and accurate, however, they lack intuition. Your intuition coupled with true intelligence...now that is a smart first step.

The result? You will have your first 1,000 virtual desktops built for YOUR users, YOUR environment and most importantly, YOUR budget.

How to get to your next 1,000 desktops? Just repeat as necessary!

Liquidware Labs , Desktop Virtualization