The expedition towards VDI

 

 

The expedition towards VDI

 

In the era of digitization there are end numbers of virtual excellences that gives us the experience of pocket-friendly technology.

Virtual desktop infrastructure is one among them.

Well let’s ride upon a story….

Mr Smith has joined newly in a multinational bank. Some way or the other he was tethering here and there for settling down. That was a Saturday afternoon George the tech savvy fellow of the office came to meet Mr Smith.

In between their conversation George shared his new experience regarding VDI.As he told it was a technology that refers to the use of virtual machines to provide and managed virtual desktops. VDI had hosted desktop environments on a centralized server and deploys them to end-users on request. 

Implementation oriented discussion

While George was discussing about the implementation of the VDI, he described that one of his friend have recently settled up an e-commerce start-up on gift items.

According to him:-

• One needs to prepare the network
• Avoid under provisioning
• Understand one’s end-users’ needs
• Perform a pilot test

According to George

VDI offers a number of advantages, such as user mobility, ease of access, flexibility and greater security. In the past, its high-performance requirements made it costly and challenging to deploy on legacy systems, which posed a barrier for many businesses. However, the rise in enterprise adoption of hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) offers a solution that provides scalability and high performance at a lower cost.

In terms of describing the benefits he described the followings:

 

• Remote access: VDI users can connect to their virtual desktop from any location or device, making it easy for employees to access all their files and applications and work remotely from anywhere in the world.
• Cost savings: Since processing is done on the server, the hardware requirements for end devices are much lower. Users can access their virtual desktops from older devices, thin clients, or even tablets, reducing the need for IT to purchase new and expensive hardware. 
• Security: In a VDI environment, data lives on the server rather than the end client device. This serves to protect data if an endpoint device is ever stolen or compromised.
• Centralized management: VDI’s centralized format allows IT to easily patch, update or configure all the virtual desktops in a system.

In between their conversation Mr Smith Remember once Jonathan, His cousin told him about he was working upon two types of VDI.

 

Persistent VDI

 

Persistent desktops have the following benefits:

• Customization. Because an image is allocated to each separate desktop, with persistent VDI end users can customize their virtual desktop.
• 
• Usability. Most end users expect to be able to save personalized data, shortcuts and files. This is especially important for knowledge workers because they must frequently work with saved files. Persistent VDI offers a level of familiarity that non-persistent VDI does not.
• Simple desktop management. IT admins manage persistent desktops in the same way as physical desktops. Therefore, IT admins don't need to re-engineer desktops when they transition to a VDI model.

 

Non-persistent VDI

Non-persistent VDI spins up a fresh VDI image upon each login. It offers a variety of benefits, including:

• Easy management. IT has a minimal number of master images to maintain and secure, which is much simpler than managing a complete virtual desktop for each user.
• Less storage. With non-persistent VDI, the OS is separate from the user data, which reduces storage costs.

The most commonly cited drawback for non-persistent VDI is limited personalization and flexibility. Customization is more limited for non-persistent VDI, but IT can layer a mechanism to append the user profile, applications and other data at launch. Thus, non-persistent VDI presents a user with a base image with unique customizations.

Shortcomings of VDI

Here are some potential drawbacks of implementing VDI:

Potentially  poor  user experience. Without sufficient training, providing the user with access to two desktops (i.e., the local desktop and the virtualized desktop) may be confusing and result in a poor user experience. For example, if users attempt to save a file from the virtual desktop, they may search for it in the incorrect location. This may result in additional support requests to find missing files that were simply archived on the incorrect desktop.

Additional costs. Organizations should review financials associated with VDI in depth. While there are monetary savings associated with extending the life of endpoint hardware, the additional costs for IT infrastructure expenses, personnel, licensing and other items may be higher than expected. 

Although storage costs have been declining, they can nonetheless cause VDI to become cost prohibitive. When a desktop runs locally, the operating system, applications, data and settings are all stored on the endpoint. There is no extra storage cost; it's included in the price of the PC. With VDI, however, storage of the operating system, applications, data and settings for every single user must be housed in the data centre. Workload capacity needs, and the cost required to meet them, can quickly balloon out of control.

Complex infrastructure. VDI requires several components working together flawlessly to provide users with virtual desktops. If any of the back-end components encounter issues, such as a desktop broker or licensing server automatically rebooting or a VM deployment system running out of storage space, then users cannot make virtual desktop connections. While the VDI vendor's monitoring features offer some details regarding system issues and related forensics, large environments in particular likely need a third-party monitoring tool to ensure maximum uptime, which further adds to costs.

Additional IT staff. Maintaining staff to support a VDI environment can be difficult. In addition to recruiting and maintaining qualified IT professionals, ongoing training and turnover are very real challenges that organizations face. Furthermore, when organizations undertake new projects, they may need to hire external consultants to provide architectural guidance and initial implementation assistance.

Licensing issues. Software licensing is an important consideration. In addition to the initial procurement for VDI licensing, ongoing maintenance and support agreements affect the bottom line. Moreover, Microsoft Windows workstation and/or server licensing is required and may represent an additional cost. VDI can complicate vendor software licensing and support because some licensing and support agreements do not allow for software to be shared among multiple devices and/or users.

 

 

VDI, however, is a better fit under the following circumstances:

• Compliance and security. With RDS, all users share one server, which introduces some potential security risks.
• Business continuity. With RDS, a single network outage can affect every user. VDI is often more resilient because virtual servers can fail over.
• Custom or intensive applications. VDI is a better option for intensive applications such as computer-aided design or video editing programs. It is also better for custom applications, because it enables higher levels of personalization than RDS does.
  In between their conversation Mr Smith felt so glad to know the entire outcome of the technology. So concluding

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a desktop virtualization technology wherein a desktop operating system, typically Microsoft Windows, runs and is managed in a data centre. The virtual desktop image is delivered over a network to an endpoint device, which allows the user to interact with the operating system and its applications as if they were running locally. The endpoint may be a traditional PC, thin client device or a mobile device.

The concept of presenting virtualized applications and desktops to users falls under the umbrella of end-user computing (EUC). The term VDI was originally coined by VMware and has since become a de facto technology acronym. While Windows-based VDI is the most common workload, Linux virtual desktops are also an option.