Best Practices in Successful Desktop Virtualization Deployments

Transcription

1 Best Practices in Successful Desktop Virtualization Deployments Desktop Transformation Methodology & Top Considerations Whitepaper

2 INTRODUCTION This whitepaper has been authored by experts at Liquidware Labs and draws upon its experience with customers as well as the expertise of its Acceler8 channel partners, in order to provide guidance to adopters of desktop virtualization technologies. In this paper, we identify the major phases of a desktop virtualization implementation, and the considerations that are involved in each phase. We also outline the role our solutions play in allowing you to complete these phases successfully. Originally published in 2011, this whitepaper has been updated to reflect recent trends and developments in desktop virtualization as of May Information in this document is subject to change without notice. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording for any external use by any person or entity without the express prior written consent of Liquidware Labs. Liquidware Labs, Inc Mansell Road Suite 200 Alpharetta, Georgia U.S.A. Phone: Liquidware Labs Inc. All rights reserved. Liquidware Labs, Stratusphere, FlexApp, Flex-IO and ProfileUnity are trademarks of Liquidware Labs. All other products are trademarks of their respective owners. Doc ID #

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction... 2 Applying A Methodology To The Virtual Desktop Lifecycle... 4 Core Process To Successfully Complete POCs/Pilots... 4 Ongoing Practice To Successfully Scale in Production... 5 Why Organizations Virtualize Desktops... 5 METHODOLOGY ENSURES SUCCESS AND RECOUPS ROI EARLIER... 6 Core Process For POCs/Pilots... 9 Assessment with Stratusphere FIT... 9 Start With A Comprehensive Inventory Of The Current Physical Environment... 9 Data Classification: Identify Good Candidates For Desktop Virtualization Design (POC, Pilot) Create Use-Case Scenarios By User Group Determine How User Profiles, Settings and Data Will Be Handled Determine Best Approach To Deliver Desktop Images Planning System Capacity To Meet Desktop Performance SLAs Determine User Feedback Collection Methods Migration with ProfileUnity Validation with Stratusphere UX Ongoing Practice For Production Environments User Profile and User Environment Management with ProfileUnity Limitations of Roaming Profiles And Folder Redirection For Virtual Desktops Monitoring with Stratusphere UX Health Checks with Stratusphere UX About Liquidware Labs

4 APPLYING A METHODOLOGY TO THE VIRTUAL DESKTOP LIFECYCLE Liquidware Labs offers award-winning solutions that support the major phases in a desktop virtualization implementation. When we originally published this whitepaper, most of our customer organizations were exploring this technology, and we focused on the key phases of the POC and pilot Assessment, Design, Migration and Validation. However, this paper has been expanded with more information about scaling and managing production desktop environments, culled from our experience with our customers as they expand their deployments to more and diverse user groups. The Liquidware Labs Essentials bundle, which offers Stratusphere FIT, ProfileUnity and Stratusphere UX licenses at affordable and attractive bundle pricing, provides the end-to-end functionality that you will need to move through planning, POC, pilot and production/scaling phases successfully. In 2013, we introduced Flex-IO, a solution that addressed IOPS acceleration and storage latency in non-persistent desktop environments. Like all other Liquidware Labs solutions, Flex-IO is easy to install and affordable, and utilizes virtualization technology to address storage IOPS and latency, which are key resource constraints in virtual desktop environments. CORE PROCESS TO SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETE POCS/PILOTS Liquidware Labs solutions can be applied as an integrated suite, providing a complete tool set to accomplish the key activities of a proof-of-concept and pilot as follows: assess your current physical desktop environment inventory your hardware, OS, applications for an accurate representation your environment select the most compatible desktops for initial deployment accurately design the target desktop images and infrastructure for use cases per user group easily migrate those users to virtual desktop systems or new Windows OS deliver applications to users upon login (FlexApp, ThinApp, App-V, RDSH) validate that the new systems resources (servers, storage, network, endpoint devices, virtualization layer) are configured correctly and perform as required. ensure that new workspaces meet user experience requirements and SLAs deliver on budget and to management CAPEX and OPEX considerations 4

5 ONGOING PRACTICE TO SUCCESSFULLY SCALE IN PRODUCTION A critical distinction between pilots and production environments is that the latter are much more dynamic. Assuredly you will be adding users, upgrading applications & OS, maintaining with patches, etc. These changes can have unpredictable consequences in the virtual desktop shared resource environment. Liquidware Labs solutions offer optimal value because you will not out-grow them. The same solutions will support scaling and proactively managing your environment as it grows and changes over time. ProfileUnity with FlexApp provides ongoing user profile management and workspace management, as well as unique application virtualization that reduces the number of master images to maintain. Stratusphere UX provides critical time-based monitoring that also can be applied in Health Checks to uncover root causes of issues and bottlenecks that may be plaguing the performance of production virtual desktops. Flex-IO addresses the need to reduce storage latency and increase IOPS per host and can be applied to any environment running on VMware vsphere hosts. WHY ORGANIZATIONS VIRTUALIZE DESKTOPS Organizations choose to leverage desktop virtualization for a number of reasons, including the need to: Migrate off of Microsoft Windows XP Support co-existence among multiple versions of Microsoft OS including XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.x/Server 2008, 2012 Replace outmoded user management tools such as Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection or basic UPM solutions such as VMware VPM or Citrix UPM Bring user profiles and user-authored data inside secure data center locations Enhance security with locked down endpoints for remote or field workers, outside consultants Provision new workspaces easily for business peak seasons or one-off scenarios Provision a form of hot desking which allows shifts of users to share the same endpoint devices Support BYOD strategies and anytime, anywhere, any device logins Support regulatory and compliance requirements Support desktop DR strategies by leveraging image backup and image replication software to replicate desktop images to a secondary site. As more organizations have moved into production and the technology has matured, there is increasing evidence that desktop virtualization also saves considerable costs once in production and rapidly recoups the initial capital investment. Liquidware Labs customers indicate too that the ease-of-management and security gains are also extremely significant and provide compelling reasons to virtualize more of their desktops. ROI is increased once economies of scale are achieved. 5

6 METHODOLOGY ENSURES SUCCESS AND RECOUPS ROI EARLIER By approaching your desktop transformation project using Liquidware Labs established industry best practice methodology, you will have the information you need at every given point to support critical decision making and ensure your project advances as planned. Below is an image that depicts the Liquidware Labs Desktop Transformation Methodology. This image shows a core process of Assess, Design, Migrate and Validate that is a step-by-step process to take you successfully through a proof of concept and the initial pilot. The outer ring of Desktop Monitoring and Health Checks and User and Application Virtualization, and Acceleration represents ongoing activities that must be in place for successful long-term management and scaling of the desktop environment. Liquidware Labs Desktop Transformation Methodology: POC to Production 6

7 Unlike other desktop virtualization providers, Liquidware Labs develops its solutions to drive organizations through this methodology; the methodology is NOT designed to rationalize or market our offerings. This is a key distinction with Liquidware Labs in that we offer complete software suite to support desktop environments over a variety of platforms physical, virtual or RDSH -- which you may utilize. Our solutions are platform-agnostic and work across physical, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Red Hat platforms. Liquidware Labs solutions include: Stratusphere FIT is the industry-leading assessment solution, used by today's largest systems integrators and professional services organizations worldwide. This solution monitors and logs a variety of key individual desktop and user performance metrics. Our VDI FIT analyzer feature generates detailed reports to provide insight into your organization's application and user consumption of network, storage, CPU, memory and other compute resources. This comprehensive portrait of your environment provides a baseline for proper designing and sizing of infrastructures resources and virtual desktop images. ProfileUnity delivers a flexible user workspace by making existing user profiles universally compatible with anytime migration to Windows OS (XP/2000/Vista/Win 7/8.x) on any desktop platform. This solution can replace roaming profiles and folder redirection and outmoded migration tools such as Microsoft USMT. ProfileUnity feature, FlexApp, enables a virtually limitless number of applications to be stored separately from Windows OS, yet 'snapped-in' in only seconds at login. FlexApp fills a void in the virtual desktop market and expands the user candidate pool for VDI by empowering users to install the applications they need to be productive. FlexApp supports departmental installed applications which are controlled, delivered and managed by administrators, without affecting the underlying desktop image(s). Stratusphere UX provides end-to-end visibility to ensure desktops are consistently delivered with the best user experience available. The solution provides an ongoing and constant rating of desktop performance by application, group, or user. Because Stratusphere UX tracks hundreds of time-based metrics on all integral components, administrators can not only proactively track desktop performance, but also, more importantly, spot trouble areas, isolate root causes and proactively address them. Stratusphere UX has been used to perform Health Checks on hundreds of stalled desktop virtualization projects to uncover bottlenecks and root causes of issues. From these real-world experiences, we have evolved a separate methodology for performing a Health Check. Flex-IO is IOPS Acceleration technology for non-persistent VDI including VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenDesktop environments. Flex-IO leverages VMware ESXi host RAM and compression to accelerate IOPS to approximately 25,000 or more per host. The solution efficiently uses host RAM, as little as 32GB per 100 users, to accomplish an average 40x increase per host. RAM requirements for Flex-IO are approximately 50 percent the requirements of other IOPS accelerator solutions on the market, making Flex-IO implementation very cost effective. 7

8 The following illustration depicts how Liquidware Labs solutions suite can be deployed to support a mixed desktop virtualization environment that delivers workspaces through a combination of VDI, physical machines and RDSH application hosting. Liquidware Labs Solutions Architecture for Enterprise Desktop Deployments 8

9 CORE PROCESS FOR POCS/PILOTS The following sections outline each step and considerations for the core process to support POCs and pilots which includes Assessment /Design, Migration, Validation. ASSESSMENT WITH STRATUSPHERE FIT The initial assessment is possibly the single-most important step in a desktop virtualization project, as it supports critical decision-making with solid measurement data. Organizations which have skipped this step often hit roadblocks later when virtual desktops are in production. Typically the organization wants to add new or different types of users, (e.g., remote or mobile workers) only to find the desktop image is inappropriate or the infrastructure lacks the resource capacity to support them. Proper assessments can prevents these issues from stopping your progress later. START WITH A COMPREHENSIVE INVENTORY OF THE CURRENT PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT All organizations are challenged to inventory and manage their desktops and there is no mystery as to why. Especially today, end users can be located anywhere and perform work at any time. End users may not be in the same location where IT Support staffers are. Desktop users customize their desktops, so that no two are exactly the same. Even within the same organizational department, end users employ different versions of OS and applications. They can work offline or online, and they may have multiple and diverse endpoint device types from which they work. In spite of this dynamism and diversity, however, it is critical to capture an accurate and detailed picture of your physical desktop environment in order to successfully plan the capacity and image design of your next-generation desktops. Liquidware Labs Stratusphere FIT obtains the essential data directly from desktops in an automated, proscribed process, thus preventing errors in gathering data or in analyzing it. Utilizing a unique, patented, proprietary approach, Stratusphere FIT deploys Connector ID (CID) keys to target desktops and can collect data from hundreds or even thousands of physical machines, no matter where they are. Stratusphere FIT also monitors and logs critical desktop and key user performance metrics at all levels of your current infrastructure from the user desktop, the datacenter, storage and network and packages this information in a series of reports that support analysis, decision-making, and ultimately design, of the virtualized environment. 9

10 The initial assessment with Stratusphere FIT typically includes: Inventory of machines including configuration details (CPU, memory, disk, network, monitors, printers, peripherals, age, location / host, time in use) Inventory of applications for virtualized and non-virtualized applications, including versions and patch levels, including time in use Inventory of users and groups (user groups are defined in Active Directory or any LDAP directory) CPU consumption including by system and by user, machine, application Memory consumption (including swapping and page faults), by user, machine, application Network consumption and performance by user, machine, application Disk consumption and performance by user, machine, application User logon durations (the time it takes a user logon to complete) Application load times (the time it takes an application to load and initialize) Graphics intensity to identify the level of graphics and screen refresh demands by user, machine, and application Non-responding applications Unused applications Network latency Network application response times Failed or dropped network connections Obviously, this is a comprehensive and lengthy list of data which must be collected. In addition, the frequency and scope of data collection should be tailored to your needs and purpose. You will need to decide whether you want to collect data from an entire group or just a sampling of users and desktops, or both. You will also need to decide the duration of the collection period. We typically recommend a 15-day minimum but if there are applications that are used rarely, you may want to expand the duration of the data collection cycle to 20, 30 days or more to ensure you capture a full cycles of all applications and end-user work behavior. Finally, you need to determine the frequency of the data collection, for example, every 15 minutes, once an hour, or once a day, etc. These parameters can be set within Stratusphere FIT, which then feeds collected metrics data into the Stratusphere Hub virtual appliance. There it is aggregated to provide purpose-built centralized reporting for both initial assessments and ongoing planning exercises. 10

11 DATA CLASSIFICATION: IDENTIFY GOOD CANDIDATES FOR DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION Once you have gathered data, the next step is to sort it within a classification system to identify the desktops, users and applications that are a good candidates (are FIT) for virtualization and which are not. If the classification system is well designed, it will also support subsequent analysis needs in the pilot to identify the virtual desktops, users and applications that are not performing as expected. Some important guidelines for classification are: Use multiple data elements, since no single element is sufficient for good classification Classify over an appropriate period of time, individual spikes or lulls can be misleading unless they are evaluated in context by either time or scale Associate classification to groups, so that you can not only see how individual users or desktops are classified, but also how groups are classified for example, by users, by location (remote or mobile) or by resource requirements. Stratusphere FIT utilizes a classification approach in which each data element is sub-classified into bins. These sub-classification bins are rolled up into an overall classification system. Bins can be defined manually or automatically, based on population percentages, value clusters, or other techniques. The assignment of data values into bins, and the assignment of the overall classification for each individual (machine, user or application) can be done by simple boundary value comparisons, or by some degree of fuzzy logic. Binning has three strengths, namely its ease of setup, its speed of calculation, and its resulting explanatory power. With its inherent classification binning logic, Stratusphere FIT identifies and provides highly accurate FIT ratings for Good, Fair and Poor user candidates for desktop virtualization projects. The default parameters built into Stratusphere FIT to gauge desktop virtualization fitness are based on recommendations of major virtualization vendors, industry standards and our own internal expertise gained by performing hundreds of assessments over the last decade. However, because each organization has their own unique considerations, the solution allows these parameters to be adjusted to be relevant to your specific needs. At the end of the assessment, you will be able to: Select the optimum user group (or groups) which are most compatible with VDI platforms for the initial POC and pilot. (Recommended to start with easiest group of users for general migrations.) Understand the degree of difficulty to migrate and the special requirements to migrate a specific user group (e.g., engineers, offshore developers) to VDI. 11

12 DESIGN (POC, PILOT) Having accurate and precise information from the Assessment phase is critical to designing the appropriate infrastructure and virtual desktop image for your users. Top considerations of the Design phase include: Selecting a group of test desktop users for the POC/pilot and understanding their requirements Identifying the applications, OS and resources (CPU, RAM, Disk, GPU, etc.) the test desktop users group utilizes Identifying the conditions under which the test desktop user group works (i.e., remotely, offline, mobile, etc.) Developing use-case scenarios for user candidates selected during the assessment Determining which technologies (and which vendors offerings) will be incorporated into the overall architecture in order to meet the requirements of the use-case scenarios Determining how user settings and user data will be handled Determining the best form to support the desktop image (how many, non-persistent or persistent, etc.) Planning capacity and sizing of the systems that will be needed to support user SLAs Determining how, when and how often to collect feedback from users Incorporating automation tools to gather objective feedback on virtual desktop performance as well as for diagnostics of root causes of issues that may present themselves to adjust design based on observed data. The next sections will provide insight into the best way to move through these tasks. 12

13 CREATE USE-CASE SCENARIOS BY USER GROUP While metrics gathered through Stratusphere FIT provide a solid baseline for planning, this is not sufficient, as essentially it is a historical look at end users behavior with existing physical desktops. The next key step is to develop user requirements in detailed use-case scenarios which represent user and system behavior in a forwardlooking perspective that takes into account virtual desktop efficiencies and new requirements. Developing use cases per user group forces you to think through their work patterns, identify the resources they will need, and ensure that the organization agenda is also met. This paper does not provide in-depth guidance on developing use cases. Designing use cases is a discipline unto itself and requires the expertise and experience of highly trained professionals. If you do not have the internal expertise or staff cycles to support the creation of use cases, we strongly recommend that you use a Liquidware Labs Acceler8 Partner to perform this work. Liquidware Labs Acceler8 Partners have a high level of expertise derived from experience across hundreds of real-world customer environments, and are a proven option for outside desktop virtualization consulting. Your use-cases will need to identify at a minimum: Users (Desktop Owners) Goals of users Special requirements of users e.g., remote work, offline capability, high CPU/graphics/IOPS usage, etc. Goals of functional group to which users belong Corporate goals Stakeholders or others who will be involved or affected by the outcome of the use case Preconditions (or conditions that must be met for the use case to start) Triggers (events that cause the use case to start) Course of events or work flows Alternative paths or exceptions Successful post-work user conditions Business rules (based on internal processes) Policies compliance Security compliance 13

14 DETERMINE HOW USER PROFILES, SETTINGS AND DATA WILL BE HANDLED It may seem strange that this topic is included as second under design, but in fact, how you handle user profiles and user environments will either expand or limit your options, so you must at least understand and consider this aspect before moving forward with image and infrastructure design. A user profile is the collection of files and settings unique to an individual user, such as desktop settings, documents and files, pictures, icons, internet shortcuts, etc. Most people experience this through their own local user data and profile information on their local C:\ drive. In the past, users have been tied to their physical machines and OS. Decoupling user profiles, settings and data from Windows OS and hardware, will require you to utilize roaming profiles and folder redirection or leverage a user virtualization solution. User virtualization technologies allow you to make user profiles portable. This would mean that, no matter where or how users got into their workspaces, they could access their profiles which would retain all the personalization they created over time. This is an especially important consideration today, when users want to BYOD ( Bring Your Own Device ) to use for work. If the user profiles, settings and user data are handled independently and located in a central repository in the data center, then only applications and OS are placed in the master image, which can greatly simplify image management. This approach also opens the door to desktop DR strategies being deployed. So, the choices you make regarding the handling of user profiles will effectively dictate the ultimate architecture of your desktop virtualization deployment. 14

15 DETERMINE BEST APPROACH TO DELIVER DESKTOP IMAGES Any decisions made about user profile management should be factored into the use-cases. The use-cases become the basis for choosing from among different vendors offerings, and designing and building out the system with the features and capacity to amply support users, workloads and application processes. This paper is not designed to provide a detailed overview of specific virtualization vendor s offerings, nor do we make any specific recommendations. Liquidware Labs solutions are platform-agnostic so you can utilize our offerings regardless of which platform or approach that you choose. However, there are many ways to virtualize desktops or desktop components, and below is a brief outline of the major technologies that are employed to deliver user profiles, applications and/or full workspaces to users. Session Virtualization, also called Presentation Servers or Application Hosting This approach essentially is streaming applications to users using Remote Desktop Protocols. All the work is performed on back end servers, and users interact with them through a presentation layer client on their endpoint devices. All the applications, settings, configurations and data used are kept centrally and run over the network. Examples include Microsoft Terminal Server and Citrix XenApp. Typically this approach serves well when multiple users all log into a single shared desktop image. Session virtualization s main advantage is that it is fairly straightforward to deploy. However, it doesn t easily support the need to run multiple OS images, nor can you provide user personalization with this solution alone. VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) This approach delivers desktops in virtual machines (VMs). Users do not share a desktop image, but are delivered a workspace VM. There are two dominant widely-used VDI architectures: Persistent VMs whereby each user gets a dedicated VM for that user alone that includes user profile, user data, OS, applications and desktop configuration. Essentially, this approach is the same as a physical desktop but is delivered in a container as a VM. The advantage of this approach is that is can be set up and managed by traditional processes and tools. The disadvantage is that the VM can grow extremely large very rapidly and may experience performance issues over time. Non-Persistent Stateless Linked Clones, whereby a pool of VMs cloned from the same master gold image can be accessed by user groups. Each user gets a VM at the start of their work session and that VM returns to the pool when the user has finished. No settings or any other events from the session are retained. These desktops do not contain user personalization, but they can be matched with user virtualization solutions which can deliver a full-blown workspace on par with physical desktops. VMs are delivered to users by means of a connection broker. Leading connection brokers include VMware Horizon View and Citrix XenDesktop. VDI requires much more upfront planning and design to ensure the infrastructure is robust enough and properly configured to support VDI. This approach can also become more complex if large numbers of desktop images must be supported. 15

16 Application Virtualization This is an approach in which applications and application settings are packaged into a single.msi or.exe executable that can be deployed to many Windows operating environments. Because the applications and setting are isolated from each other and execute independently, they do not affect the underlying operating system and do not generate application-to-application or application-to-os conflicts. Strictly speaking, application virtualization is not desktop virtualization; however this approach by itself can be more than adequate for many desktop users needs. FlexApp is an advanced application virtualization feature of ProfileUnity and does not work in exactly the same way as traditional application virtualization. Instead of packaging applications, the FlexApp service keeps track of where each application file should be located within the OS and file system as if the application were being natively installed. These locations are bookmarked with FlexApp, and a corresponding symbolic link (similar to a shortcut) is saved and reinserted to the operating system upon a user's subsequent login. FlexApp enables users to install their own applications, or Administrators to assign department-level applications to users. FlexApp is complementary to other application virtualization solutions, such as VMware ThinApp and Microsoft App-V, and can be used side-by-side for a complete solution. Even complex applications with multiple dependencies, such as itunes, QuickBooks and Adobe Creative Suite, can be delivered successfully via FlexApp, enabling this feature to support application virtualization across a very wide spectrum of use cases. User Virtualization This approach describes a group of technologies that capture and manage the user profile information (settings, data, configurations and preferences) that make each user s desktop unique. The idea of virtualizing the user state has been around since Microsoft introduced roaming profiles with Windows 2000 to save user settings to a network share, and folder redirection, to save user data in the same way. User virtualization in the context of desktop virtualization, however, means decoupling the user profile from the OS and hardware, to create a flexible user profile that can be matched to either a physical or virtual desktop upon logon. Like application virtualization, user virtualization is an adjunct technology to desktop virtualization. 16

17 Layering This is a method of desktop virtualization that divides a disk image into logical parts to be managed individually. For example, if all members of a user group use the same OS, then the core OS only needs to be backed up once for the entire environment who share this layer. Layering can be applied to local physical disk images, client-based virtual machines, or host-based desktops. Because Windows operating systems do not natively support layering, each vendor must develop a distinctive proprietary solution, and no two layering solutions are alike. This aspect should be taken into consideration when evaluating the variety of layering options available. Also, layering represents a complete solution for delivering desktops, it is typically not combined with other desktop virtualization technologies. Use Case Example: Most desktop virtualization projects can take advantage of more than one of these approaches. Here is an example of how that might play out: Organization A chooses non-persistent linked clone VMs combined with user virtualization in order deliver personalized workspaces to in-office users. They also decide to leverage application virtualization to reduce the number of master gold desktop images to a few containing only the OS and applications which apply to all workers. Organization A has a smaller engineering team that will be kept on physical workstations with shared storage; however engineers user profiles will be virtualized so that they can swap workstations indiscriminately. Organization A has an affiliate, Organization B. Organization A will deliver published applications to Organization B workers who need to access data from and input data back to Organization A, but there is no need to manage user profiles for this group. If you can afford the cycles, it is a very good idea to have multiple pilots with different users, desktop images, application or workspace delivery methods or with different vendors products to ensure you have the right combination of desktop virtualization technologies to complement your use cases. 17

18 PLANNING SYSTEM CAPACITY TO MEET DESKTOP PERFORMANCE SLAS Accurate well-researched capacity planning is critical in your design phase. Too much capacity and you incur excessive expense; too little capacity and you are setting yourself up for performance issues. The desktop metrics captured in the initial assessment will help you to create a baseline of your target system capacity. However, it should be noted that this is not a simple one-to-one calculation of totaling up the overall CPU, Disk and RAM capacity represented by your physical PCs. How you determine overall capacity will be based on a number of factors, including the hypervisor you utilize, the number and kind of desktop images supported, persistent vs. nonpersistent VM architectures and the number and kind of applications hosted, and so on. As a general rule, the total CPU, Memory, IOPS and Graphics Intensity of all the VMs hosted on a server should never exceed the total of the physical host server. In addition, it is critical that each individual virtual desktop disk (VMDK) is allocated adequate storage or it may become unstable. You must consult the major platform vendors sizing recommendations as well as their reference architectures in order to obtain the correct ratios for planning. Storage IOPS and network bandwidth are both critical capacity resources in designing virtual desktop infrastructures, it is also strongly advised you consult your storage and network experts as well. Over the course of the pilot, as you experience how your virtual desktops actually perform versus your initial assumptions, you may need to address workload balancing and failover ensuring that virtual machines, or VMs, are re-distributed in such a way that makes the most efficient use of your host resource pools. DETERMINE USER FEEDBACK COLLECTION METHODS It is essential that you enfranchise users early in the desktop virtualization project and that you get their feedback regularly about how their virtual desktops perform and the quality of their user experience. If your users are having issues or feel that their productivity is hindered, you run the risk they will not adopt the new approach. You have a number of options as to how you will collect responses from your users. These options run the gamut from software that automates the process of validating desktop performance and user experience to manual processes, such as surveys, focus groups, onsite observation and one-on-one interviews. A combination of these techniques is best to gain a holistic view of the user experience; however be sure that you are able to filter out subjective opinions and apply objective criteria to measure success. A sophisticated solution such as Liquidware Labs Stratusphere UX can be used to gain an objective measure of how your virtual desktops are performing and compare them to the baseline of physical desktop performance established with Stratusphere FIT in the initial assessment data collection. Stratusphere UX provides built-in validation reports to provide objective comparative data on user experience on virtual desktops compared to baseline physical desktops performance. 18

19 MIGRATION WITH PROFILEUNITY Migration from the physical desktop to virtual ones can be painful unless you utilize an automated process to addresses the potential pitfalls of the user migration process. This procedure can be even more daunting when an organization needs to move users from an older OS to a new Windows OS at the same time they wish to migrate from physical to virtual desktops. However it is critical to perform this step accurately in order to rapidly advance the POC and Pilot. Migrating users to a new OS or a new desktop platform typically encompasses the following steps: Capture User Settings and Personalization Capture User Data Capture Application Data Settings Migrate Users Microsoft currently offers a less than user-friendly solution to do a one-time migration from Windows XP to Windows 7/8 called USMT (User State Migration Tool). USMT is a command-line based utility and can be used to do a one-time migration of user profiles and certain registry settings (user state) to port a user's profile from Windows XP to Windows 7. It is not without its challenges though. Although Microsoft has gone to great lengths to document the process of using USMT for an enterprise migration, many administrators find the process is still too time-consuming and error-prone to be very effective in large environments. As a result, most experienced administrators have found ways to script the automation for several users at once. An alternative to support quick, accurate and reliable migrations is Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity, which provides the following benefits: Capture User Settings and Personalization With the launch of Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed the user profile format with new folder names and storage locations. This change means that Windows XP/2000/and Server 2003 roaming user profiles, and solutions that rely on roaming profiles, can no longer migrate to or co-exist with Windows 7 and later Windows OS. From the first time that ProfileUnity runs, it harvests the user profile off of the existing OS to create a universal user Windows profiles in native format that can be used for any modern Windows OS running on ANY platform including XP/2000/Server 2003/Vista/Windows 7/Server 2008, and soon, Windows 8.x /Server 2012 r2 whether they are running on virtual or physical platforms. The universal profile is also compatible with RDSH applications. A Guided Configuration Wizard automatically turns on all of the functionality you need to start the migrations process in your current version of the Windows OS and complete the Windows 7 or 8 migration process anytime you are ready. Because migrations are automated and performed in the background, there is no user downtime, user productivity is unaffected and the move to the new OS platform is seamless. Built-in reporting allows administrators to track which users have been successfully migrated, and which have not. 19

20 Capture User Data ProfileUnity automatically harvests user authored data, such as My Documents, Photos, etc., from legacy desktops. The data is synched to a new location such as a network drive or external cloud storage providers. When the background synch has successfully completed, the folders are then redirected to the new location. This automatic data migration functionality is a powerful solution to help ensure that no mission critical data is left behind. Capture Application Data Settings Organizations often also upgrade applications during an OS migration. ProfileUnity seamlessly makes users' custom application data settings available even across disparate versions of applications for virtually all applications. Users can seamlessly roam between versions of MS Office Suite and most other applications, enjoy automatic configuration of new versions of applications, and retain custom configurations on Windows desktop. Mixed 32- and 64-bit platforms and applications versions are also seamlessly supported. VALIDATION WITH STRATUSPHERE UX Liquidware Labs Stratusphere UX provides a powerful set of features for the ongoing performance validation of virtual desktops once they are into production. Validation reports are built in to Stratusphere UX so that is becomes a very simple process to compare virtual desktop performance against set thresholds in order to easily see performance gains/losses when a change is made to the infrastructure. It is critical to perform a validation after the migration to compare user experience on virtual desktops to physical desktops. A sophisticated solution such as Liquidware Labs Stratusphere UX can be used to gain an objective measure of how your virtual desktops are performing and compare them to the baseline of physical desktop performance established with Stratusphere FIT in the initial assessment data collection. Stratusphere UX provides built-in validation reports to provide objective comparative data on user experience on virtual desktops compared to the baseline physical desktops. Validation reports should also be run when adding users, adding or updating applications, adding or changing infrastructure resources or balancing workloads. 20

21 ONGOING PRACTICE FOR PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS The following sections outline considerations to successfully scale and manage production desktop environments with Liquidware Labs solutions. USER PROFILE AND USER ENVIRONMENT MANAGEMENT WITH PROFILEUNITY Once users have been migrated to the new platform, user virtualization technologies can allow administrators to manage them much more easily while scaling production environments. For many organizations today, it is critical that users are supported in an anytime, anywhere, any device mode, allowing them to access systems regardless of the device they are using, what time of day they are logging in, what network they are on or their location. Many IT staff also routinely deal with a diversity of desktop platforms arising out of mergers or acquisitions or must support outside remote workers, for example, field operations or off-shore developers. With a robust user virtualization solution such as Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity, IT staff can more easily manage user profiles, data and applications, and ensure that users personalized settings are applied to desktops and applications regardless of the platform, location or end point device. They also manage the user environment settings from a central console and can ensure that users have access to local resources, such as printers and other devices. Desktop DR strategy can also be implemented. LIMITATIONS OF ROAMING PROFILES AND FOLDER REDIRECTION FOR VIRTUAL DESKTOPS A roaming user profile is a user's data, preferences and settings (normally stored locally) that are stored on a central file server accessible from any network-joined desktop computer. These profiles are updated when users log on to and log off. Administrator must set up users with roaming profiles; this is not an automatic process. If a roaming profile is created, the login prompt on the local computer checks to see if the user exists in the domain rather than on the local computer; no pre-existing account is required on the local computer. If the domain login is successful, the roaming profile is copied from the central file server to the desktop computer, where a local account is created for the user. Roaming profiles can be universally applied to Windows desktops whether physical, terminal services and virtual desktop environments. Some issues with roaming profiles include profile bloat in which these files become very large and thus slowdown login and logoff for users. Also if roaming profiles are used for many users who are all logging on and off at the same time, this could slow down the network considerably. Folder redirection refers to automatically re-routing I/O to and from local desktop folders to storage elsewhere on a network to ensure that users do not store data locally, but to a designated storage location on the network. Folder redirection allows saving data regardless of storage location and separates user data from profile data, thus decreasing the profile size and time required to log on. Folder redirection was designed to mitigate the issue of profile bloat, or profile sizes becoming so large that logon times become unacceptable. 21

22 While roaming profiles and folder redirection can be used to make profiles and user data portable in virtual desktops, they require too much manual intervention to be used successfully in large desktop environments. VMware and Citrix also offer solutions for addressing user profile portability but these solutions share some of the same issues. User Profile Management Depending on the approach you take to virtualizing a specific user group, you may or may not need to consider delivering a persistent user profile as part of users desktop experience. If you decide that you need to allow your users to retain the ability to personalize their desktops, you have a number of different methods to handle their user profiles, including roaming profiles, folder redirection or by leveraging a user virtualization solution. A user profile is the collection of files and settings unique to that individual user, such as the Windows user profile, desktop settings, documents or other media output, pictures, icons, internet shortcuts, etc. Most people experience this through their own local user data and profile information on their local C:\ drive. In the physical world the user is tied to the machine and operating system of that machine. User virtualization allows you to decouple user personalization from any specific drive and make it portable. This would mean that, no matter where or how users got into their systems, they could access their profiles which would retain all the personalization they created over time. This is an especially important consideration today, when users want to BYOD ( Bring Your Own Device ) to work and support work from home programs. Also mobile and remote workers benefit tremendously from accessing their user profiles anytime, anywhere on any device. Finally any disaster recovery plan should include user virtualization even if no other virtualization technologies are considered. If a particular facility cannot operate, users can still get in and use secondary sites to carry on because they are not locked into a physical place. Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity delivers user profile management in a unique method that imposes very low overhead on existing systems while delivering very high value. Profile Unity user profile management provides the following benefits: Supports any Windows operating system version (i.e. XP, 7, 8.x, Server 2003/08/12) desktop experience. Replaces roaming profiles and folder redirection with robust, scalable user profile management. Provides consistent user experience across all desktop delivery modes -- one user profile for all desktop delivery modes. Applies policies and delivery of local resources based on context ( context-awareness ) of user type, location and other identifiers so that users get the resources they need when, where and how they are required. Provides ability to automatically configure and port application settings and custom inclusions beyond the normal profile store. Seamlessly handles large file sizes, file quantities and profiles for ease in scaling. 22

23 No need to allocate additional infrastructure (dedicated servers) other than minimal storage per user that is usually already allocated for projects. Rapid template-driven implementation in POC and Pilots -- usually less than an hour. Fully configuring ProfileUnity user profile management for thousands of users can take only days versus weeks. Supports lock down of endpoints by user to ensure that access is restricted. Centralized management console for Persona, Applications, Configurations, and central migration settings, for all Windows desktops. Supports Desktop Disaster Recovery - persona, data, apps restored in seconds to any Windows desktop. ProfileUnity also supports folder redirection ensuring that user data is saved in appropriate network share. In addition, ProfileUnity, through integration points with Microsoft software, including Outlook and Office, Exchange and Active Directory, allow administrators to leverage existing values, filters and rules and apply policies to user groups more easily. Once a user is managed with ProfileUnity they can be on-boarded to the next Windows OS version or even a virtual desktop seamlessly and with zero user downtime. The users persona, settings, certain apps, and data, follow the user to their new desktop. In addition, though its FlexApp feature, users have the ability to further personalize their desktops by installing their own applications, without impacting the underlying desktop image. This ability means that fewer gold master images need to be managed as well as ensuring that all user installed applications are controlled. User Environment Management User environment management (UEM) is the management of a user's experience with regard to their desktop experience. Typically users have access to a computer, which entails access to an operating system and the applications that they need for work. As users use their computers, over time, they customize the environment to their specific circumstances, which includes their own personal preferences (personalization). Common user changes are signatures, language settings and the look and feel of the desktop. In addition, each organization applies policies to users in terms of what they can and cannot access both in terms of actual resources, such as drives, printers and other peripheral devices and application as well as assigning levels of access. As a result, the overall user environment becomes a complex mix of the user s preferences and corporate access assignments. Over time, personal computers have evolved to a variety of device types and greater dependence on shared networked structures. In addition, the methods of desktop delivery have proliferated, including stand-alone (personal) computer, virtual desktops, terminal servers, application virtualization, application streaming. Critical to the user environment is making sure that user profiles are portable in one manner or another from one session to the next. In a mixed environment, it is critical that there is a method to consistently deliver a user s profile and its 23

24 attendant settings, and all the accumulated customizations to the user s environment (both from the user and from the organization) to that user, regardless of which endpoint device is used to log into the system. User environment management software that enables the user profile and environment to be abstracted from the operating system and applications, be centrally managed, and be portable, that is delivered to users ondemand, enabling dynamic personalization of provisioned desktops and easier migration of users to newer technologies such as virtual desktops. ProfileUnity goes beyond just basic profile management to offer true User Environment Management features. ProfileUnity keeps desktop users productive by allowing central management of user personalization, specific configurations, and access to applications and peripherals, whether locally installed or virtualized. Whether physical or virtual Windows desktop environments across all desktop platforms including Citrix, VMware, RedHat and Microsoft., once a user is under management they are able to logon to any desktop in the enterprise. ProfileUnity offers time and cost-saving capabilities allowing administrators to: Deploy user desktop settings from one central console Migrate user data to VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop & Windows 7/8 Manage user experience per User, AD Group, IP Subnet & more Manage users across delivery modes including VDI, RDSH, physical and DAAS. ProfileUnity automates routine desktop management tasks such as creating application shortcuts, mapping drives, installing printers, and configuring Outlook MAPI profiles. The solution can also modify environment variables, adjust Internet proxy settings, configure RDP connections, and further customize client machines during user logon. All UEM features are administered from one central console. 24