We are delighted to have a growing number of customers with Citrix XenDesktop. Unfortunately, we see some of them sometimes struggle with the implementation of technology development and it seems that some of you are taking more time to deliver value to your end users that you had originally intended.
The good news is that there are some relatively simple steps you should take at the beginning of the office of the transformation initiative to minimize obstacles and unexpected upheaval. A couple of key things before you start if:
- Desktop Virtualization is not as server virtualization. Workloads are different, the design of hypervisors, storage, monitoring, etc. are different. So expect that you will need to build or acquire the skills and knowledge to be successful.
- Desktop Virtualization is a transforming force. Probably the best organizational structure for IT will be different from what has worked so far.
- Do not start with the most complex project first. Many of you have a burning desire to solve a specific problem with a specific set of users - I understand the sense of urgency, but if you are not well equipped to offer, you will have forever to go live and you will spend a lot of time and energy on a frustrating project.
So what would it look like if you watched all your potential user groups, determine the business value of desktop virtualization for each group to determine which projects you can offer the fastest value and prioritize your projects accordingly
it is not hard to do, and here's how it works :?
we can describe the life cycle of the overall project into three main phases: assess, design, deploy. I focus on the evaluation piece in this blog, and engineering design and testing / deployment until go-live can be treated separately
Pitfall Alert :. Under no circumstances is it desirable to move from a seller proof of concept (POC) in production. A POC is there to convince you that the technology works on your network, your applications, your authentication, etc ... it is there to demonstrate a specific concept to answer some of your questions and not to serve the production users .
How about the review now? This follows the desktop transformation methodology, Citrix Consulting introduced in late 2010.
Start by organizing business priorities. Do you know what is a priority to IT? Do you know what is a priority for your department? Do you know what is a priority for your company? Trick:. It is not always lower the costs in the office
Example: A North American company with oil and gas exploration geophysicists on their sites north of the Arctic Circle. Season to get up and drilling rigs is only 150 days long, so any interruption in the ability of scientists to analyze samples and make recommendations for future production sites is extremely expensive. Before using virtual desktops, these guys have had some of these very rugged laptops with many special applications. Laptops often fails because of the difficult conditions and every time this happens it had to build a new device and ship it "up there" - that takes days or weeks. This client decided to move to virtual desktops using blade PC with individual GPU and affected users. This protects critical applications and data from the central administration and allows them to store the feed tank with laptops containing only a basic Windows Image 7. Whenever a device freezes to death now, it is just a matter of entering a new end point and be back running in minutes. So the office cost savings was probably very low on the priority list, while increasing agility and enabling virtual work styles is very important here.
with business priorities for the organization clearly documented, it is time to have a discussion about users and their applications. Do you know which applications your users need or use? You can say yes, but many IT departments today manage a set of applications and business units belonging and individual users procure, install and manage many of their own applications. So if you do not know what applications are present, you have two options: make a list with your business leaders (or investigate - it can take some time to do well) or deploy one of agent- based (or FSBO) tools that scan each user device and report what applications they use. You may need to clean the list that comes back and rub duplicates and remove applications that you are not ready to support. So there is always a bit of manual work to do. Now users of the group by a set of common application - which is more art than science, although there are several tools that can do this for you. You should expect to find a set of common application, but expect to have a list of individual users with individual applications they need you will need to consider as an exception.
Now look at each of the user groups you have so far and answer the following questions:
- can they all be served in the same data center - in according to their main location? Alternatively, divide the group of users appropriately.
- What are their mobility needs? Tip: In most cases, expect to be mobile, but online all the time. Exceptions to the PC era are the new assumptions in this era of cloud. If you have users who need to work entirely online, breaking into a separate user group.
- What is risk tolerance? In other words, how would your overall business suffer if these users were unable to connect to their applications and data? For most users "office" would be a nuisance, but for others, even short outages are unacceptable (clinical staff, stock traders, geophysicists our example above, etc.). Separate the user that can not withstand even short outages. The reason is that the infrastructure to serve users require additional redundancy.
- Finally, will the new end-user support their requirements? Most of the time, this is the case. I talked to a client once who bought a large amount of inexpensive thin clients and decided to deliver graphically intensive applications that require flash and HDX 3D acceleration, these parameters could not deliver.
So now you should have a good handle user groups. All users contained in a single group should be served by the same technology.
The next step is to determine the high-level virtual desktop model for each user group. Looking at your business priorities can help here. For example, if the office cost savings are high on your list, consider hosted shared desktops. The choice of this model may require you to engage in the computer server and get your applications up and running, but the cost per workstation is probably lower than making VDI desktops assigned individually. On the other hand, if you need to deliver value quickly, do not worry about office expenses too and are familiar with desktop management, you can choose the VDI desktops assigned individually. Support frames mobility initiatives is a good example of such a case
Note :. You may end up identifying multiple models FlexCast user group. Maybe you deliver the majority of applications in a pooled VDI model Windows 7 and deliver a handful of less used applications with XenApp Apps on request. For groups of users requiring mobility, add Access Gateway; for those who demand high uptimes, consider redundant data centers, etc. Do not worry about a detailed design at this point, but make sure you get a sense of the technical complexity for each user group.
Now it's time to bond together and ask yourself for each user group:
- How virtualization desktop groups aligned with my business priorities? In the example geophysicists for our oil and gas company, the answer was "very well / very important" while a set of back office users in the headquarters only scored "average" rating in this category .
- How much time will it take me to implement all it takes for this group? The answer depends largely on the overall complexity of the user group (the higher the number of applications, less complexity in most cases) and your familiarity with the necessary technologies. The less experience you have here, the more you will need to provide the value to this group. Unless you have the budget to get someone to help you.
One way to link together that has been proven quite effective, is to place each user group on a 2-dimensional array. commercial value on the vertical axis and the time value on the horizontal axis. Your high impact, fast time to value projects will be at the top left of the graph. That's where you should start ... projects to the right or to the bottom of the graph will take longer or are not that important.
I spent most of the last decade in software-related professional services, and it is amazing to me (so no surprise) how many customers are more successful that perform this initial assessment compared to those who have just started and do along the way. The good news is -. It is not difficult
Citrix customers and partners are encouraged to check the office processing accelerator, which is the tool to guide you through this process and through the design and deployment of phases. What you do on your own, with partners Citrix, Citrix or advice, methodology must always be the same and follow the steps outlined above
Here are some extra goodies for you :.
The XenDesktop Design Manual: http://bit.ly/xdhandbook
The collective wisdom of Citrix Consulting. Blogs, tweets, white papers, articles, and more
... And of course ... the office processing accelerator
As always If you -... please share your thoughts and comments
Florian Becker
Manager, Worldwide Consulting Solutions at Citrix
Twitter: @florianbecker
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