{"id":888,"date":"2022-09-12T17:09:35","date_gmt":"2022-09-12T16:09:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.insia.net:8443\/?p=888"},"modified":"2024-01-18T16:12:28","modified_gmt":"2024-01-18T15:12:28","slug":"common-vdi-challenges-and-how-to-solve-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/common-vdi-challenges-and-how-to-solve-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Common VDI Challenges and How to Solve Them"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the\u00a0first blog<\/a>\u00a0in this series, we talked about the main advantages of VDI and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), including centralized management, improved security, and ability to support bring-your-own-device (BYOD). This time, I want to focus on common problems that arise with VDI. We\u2019ll look at three big VDI challenges\u2014poor user experience, solution complexity, and high costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenge 1: Poor User Experience<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s nothing that torpedoes a VDI project faster than failure to deliver a great user experience. There are a couple of facets to this: addressing user requirements and delivering optimal performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your VDI project won\u2019t succeed if you don\u2019t understand your end-users\u2019 requirements. Get your user communities involved up front to make sure you address their needs. Good communication and managing expectations are critical. Delivering blazing performance won\u2019t make much difference if your VDI solution fails to deliver important functionality, and yet a third of VDI projects are deficient in this regard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another important reality is that almost half of VDI projects have performance issues. While performance needs may seem clear cut, once again there\u2019s no replacement for understanding the user perspective. Responsive desktops and applications are important, but may not be the only thing that matters. For example, in healthcare settings where clinicians move from location to location, login time is a performance metric with high visibility and impact. And don\u2019t overlook the value of predictability. If your VDI service delivers great performance most of the time, but with occasional unexpected slowdowns, user satisfaction will suffer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The administrative experience also plays a role in your company\u2019s overall satisfaction with a VDI solution. If the administration is complex, your team is likely to make mistakes that affect users and may delay or avoid performing necessary tasks like patches and upgrades. Ideally, you don\u2019t want VDI admins to be completely dependent on server, storage, and networking teams for infrastructure-related tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenge 2: Solution Complexity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are a number of factors that contribute to the complexity of a VDI project. Satisfying stringent feature and performance requirements plays a role, and so does addressing availability and security needs. Ensuring that a large VDI environment can fail over quickly can consume a lot of time and effort for planning, testing, and monitoring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VDI projects often take months or even years to go from proof of concept to full production. Architecting a solution that will scale as you add seats adds complexity, and there are significant risks associated with getting the design wrong. A VDI environment that\u2019s under-spec\u2019d will create big headaches later; a design that\u2019s too large increases upfront costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building your VDI environment from scratch using traditional three-tier infrastructure with separate servers, networks, and storage also contributes to complexity. It can be challenging to balance bandwidth and capacity requirements across servers, storage systems, and networks to avoid unexpected bottlenecks, and you\u2019ll need multiple tools to manage and monitor the various resource silos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenge 3: High Costs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve already touched on many of the elements that add to the cost of a VDI project. Stringent feature and performance requirements from end-users, high availability needs, and extended deployment, scaling, and upgrade cycles all play a role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you build your VDI environment using traditional infrastructure, over-provisioning the environment is almost a necessity. Storage systems must be over-provisioned initially to ensure that you\u2019ll be able to support more seats later, adding significantly to your upfront costs. Even with over-provisioning, it can be difficult to predict when storage will become a bottleneck, leading to a flood of trouble tickets and unanticipated costs for scaling and re-architecting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A traditional environment also adds management complexity that increases OpEx and slows down upgrades, troubleshooting, and other important tasks as requests pass from team to team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, if you\u2019re going to run a hypervisor like VMware ESXi, the licensing costs for a large VDI installation add up quickly, becoming a significant percentage of your overall costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Addressing VDI Challenges with HCI<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since this is a Nutanix blog, it won\u2019t surprise you that we believe that hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a key part of the solution to these VDI challenges\u2014but there are good reasons for that. VDI was the original \u201ckiller app\u201d for HCI. If you ask a VDI expert, or approach any infrastructure vendor (including one that sells both HCI and traditional solutions) they are likely to steer you to HCI for your VDI project. In the next blog in this series, we will explain some of the features of Nutanix HCI that make it particularly well suited for VDI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s also worth asking the question whether Desktop-as-a-Service can solve these VDI challenges. The short answer to that question is \u201cyes,\u201d assuming you\u2019ve done your homework to understand user requirements. We will dig into DaaS in more depth later in this series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the\u00a0first blog\u00a0in this series, we talked about the main advantages of VDI and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), including centralized management, improved security, and ability to support bring-your-own-device (BYOD). This time, I want to focus on common problems that arise with VDI. We\u2019ll look at three big VDI challenges\u2014poor user experience, solution complexity, and high costs. Challenge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vdi","tag-toc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1658,"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions\/1658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}