Smartphone ownership more than doubled in Australia last year, according to the ACMA, and globally, mobile device shipments eclipsed desktop PCs. Now IT organisations are looking at how to best manage devices such as iPads, iPhones, and Android smartphones as they make their way into the business. For many companies, the only way to grapple with this trend is to implement virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) programs as a logical path to a secure BYOD policy that ultimately reduces costs and support resources.
Network management in this new VDI environment is of top concern for IT executives as business critical applications are accessed via the virtual desktop. Businesses must plan and manage how BYOD converges with the virtualised enterprise to ensure high availability of the applications and resources maintained by service providers, while relying on secure data protection.
BYOD and VDI: Marriage in complexity heaven
The complexity BYOD brings to virtualised environments is staggering. Almost overnight, a company can have twice as many devices brought into its environment, requiring more support for more diverse form factors and operating systems than ever before. Support teams could easily be overwhelmed to say the least.
To maintain control, service providers will require more insight into user behaviour. They need to find the answers to important questions, such as; what users are doing and how is it impacting network resources? IT needs to have the right tools to predict and manage the environment to make sure that maximum computing power is continually extracted from existing network assets without compromising user performance.
Troubleshooting VDI deployments
The success of VDI and safeguarding end-user performance in the era of BYOD requires total visibility into the network infrastructure. This hasn’t been easy to do because VDI solutions act as a proxy for backend applications, tunnelling traffic to the end user, thereby making it difficult to get the end-to-end visibility needed to identify and troubleshoot problems.
One approach to unlocking VDI visibility involves analysing packet data using leading application performance management (APM) solutions that support ICA, CGP, and PCoIP, the protocols used by Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp, and VMware View. Such tools can provide detailed insight into the utilisation, latency and QoS priorities of the individual virtual channels used by the most common VDI applications. IT operations can use this visibility to understand and troubleshoot the performance of critical session or channel actions such as print, keystrokes, mouse movements, file sharing, and screen refreshes, and to prioritise more time-sensitive actions (eg keystrokes and mouse movements) over less sensitive commands (eg print and file sharing).
Leading APM solutions can also cut down the time required to determine the cause of performance problems in VDI environments, and, in some cases, pinpoint causes that would otherwise be impossible to find. They can provide the detailed metrics necessary to quickly isolate where problems are occurring and what’s causing them, dramatically reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and business disruption.
Priority traffic
Validating prioritisation of network traffic is another technique for ensuring VDI deployments are successful. ICA, CGP, and PCoIP have ingrained methods of ensuring that certain virtual sessions or channels are prioritised over others. This enables the more time-sensitive user interface data to be prioritised and sent ahead of all other data. It also allows for differentiation based on user type and traffic type. In most networks, virtual desktop and application sessions are given the highest priority, equal to or greater than VoIP, to ensure that VDI traffic receives preference over all other traffic on the network. Yet, one of the most common problems with VDI occurs when quality of service (QoS) policies get out of alignment. Leading APM solutions enable IT operations to quickly troubleshoot QoS issues as they arise, capturing detailed session or channel prioritisation information to ensure that network prioritisation is in sync with session prioritisation.
End-user performance and SLAs
Finally, monitoring and understanding end-user performance is critical to the success of VDI deployments. Few computing problems match the frustration caused by the delay of basic desktop functions, such as keystrokes. IT organisations should use tools to monitor perceived latency to quickly identify which clients and/or servers are experiencing issues. They should be able to validate performance and availability of transactions for all end users to help verify if contractual commitments have been met and identify outliers, which are important to managing SLA compliance.
In summary, VDI does not operate in a vacuum. Leading APM solutions can help IT operations understand Citrix or VMware View performance in context with the other applications on the network, measure the impact changes have on end-user experience, and understand and track utilisation to plan for bandwidth upgrades or WAN optimisation initiatives, for instance. VDI is supposed to make things easier, and it can, even in the face of BYOD. IT organisations need the right tools to monitor and control performance by mitigating latency and managing resources on the network.
Joe McPhillips is channel director for Riverbed A/NZ
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