VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a term used to describe a specific field of virtualization, which deals with creating and maintaining virtual desktops within an organization’s IT environment. The process involves the migration of desktop operating systems from physical computing resources to Virtual Machines, or VMs, hosted on centralized servers.
Its popularity is often attributed to the fact that VDI troubleshooting, installation and monitoring cost less than similar services for physical desktops, in terms of time, money and resources. Like any other form of technology, however, VDI problems occur from time to time, so it’s essential for administrators to have proper monitoring and control in place.
Why Do You Need VDI Performance Monitoring?
Since VDI is often used as an alternative to client/server computing models (also known as server-based computing), Virtual Desktop Monitoring plays a huge role in preventing and dealing with issues that occur in the virtual environment. These could range from poor application performance to increased network downtime, which can all affect user satisfaction and your bottom line.
Here are some of the main reasons for placing emphasis on VDI monitoring within the virtualization environment:
- Effective Virtualization Troubleshooting
With performance monitoring tools keeping track of possible problems in every part of your environment, VDI troubleshooting becomes faster and more streamlined. Common problem areas (like slow remote desktops/functionality, network connections and authentication) are analyzed and tracked, so possible virtualization issues can be predicted and prevented.
- User Benchmark Testing
One of the simplest ways to prevent a poor end-user experience is to understand how many desktops can run within the environment. This can be analyzed with benchmark testing of user activities and resource consumption, helping to avoid VDI issues like bottlenecks in resources or storage, which lead to low satisfaction and a poor overall experience for users.
- Optimized VDI Performance
If you want to maximize the performance and efficiency of any system, you need to monitor its metrics. VDI monitoring tools like Xangati deliver historical and real-time metrics that help you improve virtual desktop performance, user experience and productivity. Analyze device responsiveness, disk throughput, memory utilization and more, to pinpoint possible areas for improvement.
- Right Tool for the Job
Why do you need monitoring solutions for virtual desktop infrastructure if you already have server virtualization tools? The latter cannot provide visibility across every VDI tier (like web servers, profile servers, networks and storage) and are limited to virtualization (resource monitoring). VDI performance needs to be tracked for each user logged in, which virtual server monitoring tools cannot do.
How to Pick the Right VDI Performance Monitoring Tool
You need to take different factors into consideration while picking a virtual desktop monitoring solution, like:
- Type of VDI Monitoring
Before you select a monitoring tool, you need to understand what kind of metrics you need to measure, analyze and track. This helps you avoid selecting VDI troubleshooting solutions that offer lower or higher capabilities than your requirements, as well as looking for a solution after performance problems occur.
- Monitoring Frequency Needs
Since server virtualization monitoring tools cannot effectively track VDI performance for every user logged into a virtual desktop, the next step is to determine how often and how closely these need to be monitored. This is essential because VDI workloads fluctuate more than virtual server workloads do.
- Required Monitoring Features
Modern VDI monitoring tools include features that help you make the move to a virtual desktop environment, so pick one that includes capabilities you need. These range from capacity planning and load testing features that track resource usage to user experience testing that measures end-user satisfaction.
- Performance and Management
Employees will not react well to VDI environments if their virtual desktops do not perform as expected, so look for tools that monitor end-to-end connectivity, measure the performance of physical and virtual machines alike, offer real-time management as well as a database for virtual desktop use.
Xangati’s VDI monitoring solutions gather virtual desktop performance data on a historical and real-time basis, identify issues, set alerts for IT admins, offer appropriate solutions and prevent problems before they even occur. They can also streamline VDI planning and implementations, helping you make the move to virtual desktops with complete confidence!
