Centralized Virtual Desktop

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) can bring significant benefits to organizations that want to be more flexible, as well as reduce the cost and complexity of managing various client desktops, laptops and mobile devices.

Organizations that use VDI can take advantage of a centralized desktop that has clear advantages: fast deployment, lower support costs, increased security. However, VDI can also cause a number of problems for organizations that do not plan or implement the technology correctly. Many VDI pilot projects fail due to incorrect design considerations that lead to performance problems. This, in turn, leads to unsatisfied end users.

One of the most important recommendations for implementing VDI is to properly design the network and storage. Incorrectly designed network and storage can have disastrous consequences for VDI performance and end-user satisfaction.

Because the VDI architecture includes centralized virtual machines running in the data center, the VDI desktop display for the end user depends on protocols such as PCoIP, ICA, RDP, or Blast Extreme (VMware) that can successfully process data between the end user and the center data processing. This imposes more load on the underlying network.

Organizations must fully understand all aspects of VDI performance when connecting to both high-speed local area network connections and slower channels such as a WAN.

It is impossible to emphasize how important a properly designed storage is to successfully deploy VDI. When you think of traditional workstations, they work in a distributed way. All calculations, memory and storage performance are contained in individual workstations. However, in a virtual desktop environment, you accept all the calculations, memory, and storage (disk IOPs), which in the traditional workstation environment should be distributed across all workstations, centralizing these requirements to the external virtual desktop environment.