Don t Compromise on the User Experience:

Transcription

1 Don t Compromise on the User Experience: Apply Gartner s Recommendation for Successful VDI Deployments July 2017

2 2 In this paper About Login VSI... 3 Disclosure and Warranty The information, concepts, and ideas contained in this document are the property of Login VSI. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Login VSI. Any product descriptions or representations in this document are for identification purposes only and are not to be construed as a warranty of specific properties or guarantee or warranty of any other type. Login VSI shall assume no liability, either explicit or implied, for the documentation. Information in this document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, is subject to change without notice. All sample code described in this document is provided by Login VSI for illustrative purposes only. These examples have not been thoroughly tested under all conditions. Login VSI, therefore, cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or functionality of these programs or code examples. All brand names and product names used in this document are trademarks of their respective holders and are recognized as such. How important is the user experience (UX)?... 4 VDI UX: Get it right the first time... 5 Virtual users to the rescue... 5 Virtual users in production... 5 Virtual users for performance, capacity and compatibility testing... 6 Don't compromise on the user experience (UX) Login VSI. All rights reserved.

3 3 About Login VSI Login VSI provides predictive and advanced insights for virtualized desktop and server based computing environments. Our software ensures Enterprises can provide their employees with the best end-user experience. By utilizing virtual users that mimic real-world users performing real-world tasks predictive analysis will increase productivity while minimizing downtime and other costly business disruptions. Industries where the primary processes benefit greatly from a good performance, like healthcare and financial institutions, gain significant advantage from our innovative software. We have two products that employ our unique virtual users (VUs): Login PI s virtual user exists in your production environment and provides you with predictive insights on your availability, workload performance and uptime reducing helpdesk tickets and ensuring the delivery of agreed upon SLAs. Login VSI helps accelerate technology adoption by deploying VUs with realistic workloads to test scalability, capacity and the impact of hardware and software changes within your environments taking the guesswork out of performance.

4 Whitepaper 4 Excited Happy Don t Compromise on the User Experience: Apply Gartner s Recommendation for Successful VDI Focused Sad Deployments How important is the user experience (UX)? Neutral Winking VDI Like A Pro, a community-led group of VDI professionals, recently released the results of the 2017 State of the VDI/SBC Union Survey. This survey is conducted (almost) annually, and provides information from nearly 600 companies on their VDI/SBC usage. This year, one question in particular indicates a significant Error Alertchange in why people are deploying VDI solutions: By Adam Carter July 2017 Send to a friend In previous years, the primary decision factors for implementing VDI only benefitted IT. The two most popular factors were centralized management and cost reductions, which are great for the IT department, but don t acknowledge the needs of users and what they are trying to accomplish. In the recent Gartner note titled Define and Prioritize the User Experience to Succeed With VDI and DaaS, Gartner states that more than 80% of organizations that don t prioritize the user experience in the planning phase will fail to meet their virtual desktop infrastructure/desktop as a service deployment goals. A VDI deployment designed only to benefit IT is unlikely to delight users as well resulting in a solution they don t want to use. The change this year indicates companies have realized that the VDI industry has matured to the point that the remote desktop experience can be on par, if not surpass, that of a local desktop. Moreover, users are demanding the benefits of having their desktop available anytime, anywhere, from whatever device is at hand. Figure 1. The results for VDI are nearly identical, with DaaS/Remote Access surpassing all other factors in the decision to deploy. For the first time since the survey was run, Providing Desktops as a Service (DaaS)/Remote Application Access have become the most common reasons for deploying VDI/SBC environments. This is a good thing for a couple of reasons: The Gartner note, written by Gartner Analysts Nathan Hill and Michael Silver, targets someone preparing to adopt, or refresh, a remote desktop solution and provides some invaluable insights from hundreds of customer VDIrelated inquiries, including: Read more

5 5 Predict end-user experience Prevent performance issues 'Delivering a user experience that's as good as an employee's current PC experience is critical success factor when adopting VDI or DaaS.' Delivering a user experience that's as good as, or better, than an employee's current PC experience is the most important critical success factor when adopting VDI or DaaS. Address users' non-session-based usage requirements to ensure that they're aligned with business and IT goals don't reduce the quality of the UX to save costs. As mentioned previously, through 2020, more than 80% of organizations that don't prioritize the UX in the planning phase will fail to meet their VDI/DaaS deployment goals. 'Organizations that don t prioritize UX will fail to meet their VDI/DaaS deployment goals.' Gartner, April 2017 VDI UX: Get it right the first time It s a common mantra repeated by anyone who has been involved in one or more VDI deployments if it s not as good as their PC, users won t want to use their new VDI. The article warns further, that if not done right the first time, it may be difficult to revive a troubled DaaS deployment, once it has a bad reputation and that s the challenge. How can you deploy a high-quality user experience, and validate that experience, without risking the reputation of your VDI? Login VSI addressed this several years ago, and the product has become the de facto standard for VDI user experience benchmarking: Instead of exposing real users to VDI, Login VSI uses virtual users. Virtual users to the rescue Virtual users are great. They don t collect a salary, they don t go on vacation, they ll attempt to do the same tasks over and over when asked, and they never complain. They also measure exactly how long it takes them to perform those tasks, so a full analysis can be made on the UX performance. Virtual users in production There s also a strong use case for running some virtual users side-by-side with real users. With VDI in production, it is arguably even more important that performance matches the results from testing, and we offer a virtual user solution for that as well Login PI. Login PI uses the same idea of virtual users performing tasks and measuring them, but instead of having hundreds or thousands of users trying to stress test the environment, Login PI uses one or a few virtual

6 6 users that log in to the VDI, side-by-side with real users, throughout the day. The Login PI Virtual Users are watching for performance anomalies is login time longer than it was yesterday or last week? Are applications launching as expected? And if anything is out of the ordinary, Login PI sends alerts directly to notify IT that something s not right. It s a great way to validate user complaints is your VDI running slow, or is performance on par with expectations? Customers indicate that the amount of time spent resolving slowness complaints related to VDI drops when the helpdesk can easily determine if the desktop is actually slow, or if the user has unrealistic performance expectations. Login PI also provides notification of outages, so remediation activities can start before the helpdesk phones even start ringing. There are other solutions out there that work by installing an agent in every desktop or server, which can then collect performance data about the environment. However, Login PI has several advantages over agentbased monitoring solutions: The overhead associated with deploying and updating agent-based solutions. Agent-based solutions work by having the agent installed and running on all images/servers in the environment. There s additional management costs in deploying and maintaining those agents. And because it s another service running on the VM, there s increased CPU/memory utilization, which can impact both performance and density. Agent-based solutions only work when users are actively using the environment. Login PI Virtual Users can be scheduled to work around the clock, if desired. Many companies schedule Login PI to run right after a scheduled maintenance window, or early before users arrive for work. Login PI will identify any issues in the environment, such as servers that aren t back online, or performance degradation as the result of configuration changes, so they can be resolved before they impact the workday for real users. Reviews of agent-based solutions often comment about the tremendous amount of data collected and the challenges of analyzing it all. If there s a performance outage for an application, agent-based logging tools will log that performance notification for every user potentially creating hundreds of alerts or notifications. With Login PI, using a virtual user as a proxy for hundreds of real users makes that data analysis and collection much easier to manage. Real user workloads aren t consistent. If a user is working in 5MB documents one day, and 50MB documents the next, the performance metrics will be different because the data being used by the application is so different. It s a challenge to normalize that data, as well as to identify what a good performance looks like for that application. For example, if Microsoft Word is launching for a user in two seconds one day, but six seconds the next, is that because the VDI is running slow, or is it just because today the user is working with larger documents? Login PI Virtual Users work with the same size documents and access them in the same way every time, so it s very easy to establish performance baselines and identify when those baselines have been exceeded. Virtual users for performance, capacity and compatibility testing The Login VSI Virtual User concept started out as a way to validate the scale and capacity of VDI systems. Because virtual users don t need a place to sit, it s much easier to scale up testing, or really stress the system with a large user load to determine the maximum capacity. That s what Login VSI does a test scenario is identified like initiate a performance test with 200 users doing typical office worker tasks and Login VSI will log in 200 virtual users into the environment, and those users will automatically start sending s, browsing the web, creating documents and other typical office worker tasks. And while they are running these tasks, the virtual users are logging how long the tasks take, how long it took to copy a file and how long it took to launch MS Word.

7 7 As more and more users start logging on and the resource load on the VDI increases, the time to complete those tasks increases. Login VSI identifies the sweet spot the maximum number of users that were running and still reporting acceptable performance. We call that number VSImax. Login VSI can run just about any type of test scenario, like simulate a logon storm with 500 users all logging on at once at 9am on Monday morning or how does the storage perform with 1,000 users running continuously for 168 hours straight? Many customers use Login VSI as part of the validation process for any change to their server or golden image. Applying patches, upgrading Office versions and changing anti-virus providers are just a few examples of image changes, which can drastically impact VDI performance. Based on Login VSI tests, upgrading from Office 2010 to Office 2013 decreases the number of users you can host on an environment because Office 2013 uses more resources, particularly graphics and GPU-based rendering. Office 2016 actually increases user density, as compared to Office 2013, with improvements specifically geared at remote desktop environments. Any changes planned for the production environment should be validated first with a Login VSI test. Login VSI can help identify incompatibilities in new software or configurations (Login VSI workloads will fail to complete if the update contains breaking changes). Login VSI will also identify if the change increases or reduces user density, so IT can really predict the impact of rolling out a change. Don't compromise UX for budgetary reasons, because the UX cannot be traded against to reduce costs, Don't compromise on the user experience (UX) - Gartner april 2017 The Gartner article closes with this: Don't compromise UX for budgetary reasons, because the UX cannot be traded against to reduce costs. Instead, review whether your decision to deploy VDI or DaaS (or to continue using VDI or DaaS and address existing UX failings) will result in optimal UX. For many organizations, this will not be a question of either/or. Instead, it will be a matter of where to target these solutions across the business, when investing in a UX-optimized solution can be justified against all UX perspectives. Virtual users provide companies with an understanding of their VDI UX without risking any loss of productivity from their real users. Both Login VSI and Login PI enable IT departments to really understand how their environment performs, so they can administer the best user experience possible. Contact us Login VSI, Inc. 300 Tradecenter Suite 3460 Woburn, MA Phone: Login VSI B.V. De Entree BH Amsterdam The Netherlands Phone: