any infrastructure costs, centralized virtual desktops intro-duce incremental and new capital requirements.”
Significant infrastructure investments are typically required to deploy VDI. Your organization may need to purchase new servers, storage, high-speed networking, and virtualization and management software. However, these costs are often offset by several factors that ultimately result in real savings.
Such factors include the following:
✓ Lower PC hardware costs. With client virtualization, organizations may be able to extend their PC refresh cycles or purchase relatively inexpensive low-end PC hardware or thin clients.
✓ Existing data center infrastructure. Many organiza-tions have already invested in high-end servers or blade servers, storage area networks (SANs), and high-speed (10-gigabit Ethernet) networking equipment. In many cases, this existing infrastructure can be repurposed, upgraded, or scaled out to support VDI.
✓ Centralized desktop management. These “soft” cost sav-ings are often viewed skeptically, but in the case of VDI, the savings are very real. VDI gives IT staff the ability to centrally deploy, upgrade, manage, and maintain all of an organization’s “desktop” clients. For example, rather than upgrading and deploying hundreds of desktop PCs, you can upgrade a single, server-based Windows XP desktop image to Windows 7 or 8. And you can install security updates and antivirus signatures on a single, centrally managed desktop image. Plus, “crashed” desk-top systems can be quickly refreshed to minimize down-time and keep your end users productive.
Rather than positioning client virtualization as a short-term project to reduce operating expenses, organizations should link their client virtualization initiative to long-term organiza-tional goals that leverage desktop transformation and mobil-ity solutions to maximize business value.
Ignoring User Requirements
User acceptance is one of the main barriers to client virtual-ization. Ignoring your users’ unique requirements will ensure
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Instead, take the time to identify and document the unique requirements of your users and groups of users, including use cases, applications, and client devices. Then select the appro-priate client virtualization architecture (or architectures) to satisfy those requirements.
Next, take the time to build appropriate client images for your various user requirements and use case scenarios.
Thoroughly test these virtual clients with pilot user groups, get buy-in, and plan your full-scale deployment.
Refer to Chapter 2 to learn about client virtualization architectures.
Shared Virtualization Infrastructure
You’ve always been taught to share your toys, but servers and storage area networks (SANs) aren’t toys! One of the worst mistakes that an organization can make when deploying a client virtualization or VDI environment is trying to use the same server and storage infrastructure that hosts its virtual server environment. Although reusing virtual infrastructure components may seem like a good idea, there is perhaps no quicker road to failure — no matter how fast and power-ful your server, storage, and network components! Instead, your VDI environment must be completely isolated from your virtual server environment. The HP Reference Architectures discussed in Chapter 4 will help you design and build a com-pletely isolated VDI infrastructure.
Underestimating Hardware and Storage Requirements
Although client virtualization can help organizations delay or extend PC hardware refresh cycles, hardware is still impor-tant. With client virtualization, your most important hardware investment is in the data center — servers (including CPU and RAM), storage, and networking — tightly integrated in a virtual
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VDI workloads require high memory capacity, high-perfor-mance I/O throughput, and ample storage. Storage is one of the most commonly overlooked components in a VDI deploy-ment. In addition to storing unique desktop images for all your different user group profiles, you need to ensure you have sufficient storage space for disk swap space and per-sistent desktops. The HP reference architectures discussed in Chapter 4 can help you identify the appropriate hardware solutions for your VDI deployment.
For your end users, client virtualization supports many more devices than a traditional desktop PC. In addition to desktop and laptop PCs, client virtualization software can be deployed on tablets, smartphones, and thin clients, among others. Thus, client virtualization enables organizations to embrace the latest Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and flexwork trends in a secure and stable manner that further enhances employee productiv-ity. Learn more about BYOD and flexwork in Chapter 1.
Older PCs that might otherwise be unsuitable for newer oper-ating systems such as Windows 7 and 8 can be used as thin clients — requiring little more than a keyboard, mouse, dis-play monitor, boot device (such as a USB drive), and network interface card.
Scaling Up Too Fast
After your initial proof-of-concept (POC) or pilot test group, ensure you have the appropriate infrastructure in place to support your larger production deployment. A test infra-structure built for a POC or relatively small pilot group isn’t designed to support a production environment consisting of hundreds of users — so don’t try!
Instead, client virtualization requires proper planning and design to ensure the architecture is flexible and can scale as needed. A poorly designed architecture can limit your options for future expansion and can result in costly and painful rede-ployments and upgrades.
To avoid these problems, choose a solution that is well docu-mented with reference architectures and verifiable real-world examples of successful initial deployments, upgrades, and expansions.
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The Wrong Tools for the Job
Managing virtual clients isn’t the same as managing physi-cal desktops. You need management tools that provide complete visibility of your virtual and physical environment.
Performance issues in a virtual environment have the poten-tial to impact all your users. End-to-end visibility, from the virtualization server and storage platform in the data center to the individual end-user device — and all the networking components in between — is absolutely essential.
Choose a management solution that integrates across mul-tiple vendor platforms and virtualization software solutions.
If possible, select management software that doesn’t require lots of additional third-party products to provide a complete view of your virtual and physical infrastructure — you don’t want to needlessly complicate your management platform.
Too Fast Will Make Your Users too Furious
A client virtualization project can be undertaken as aggres-sively as necessary to meet your organization’s needs. But being too aggressive with a CV initiative can be a recipe for disaster. However, in the world of IT projects there are usually only two speeds — fast and faster! HP can help you develop a realistic accelerated timeline and manage the expectations of both your users and management.
A client virtualization project can be jump-started with a proven project methodology and a fully integrated, out-of-the-box client virtualization platform solution such as those docu-mented in HP’s client virtualization reference architectures (learn more in Chapter 4). A well-documented client virtualiza-tion reference architecture takes the guesswork out of much of the important design work required for a successful implemen-tation and helps to reduce operational risks such as budget overruns, lost end-user productivity, and costly delays.
The HP Client Virtualization Methodology is a trusted and proven five-step process for successful client virtualization
Appendix
Additional Resources for Client Virtualization
D
ownload these helpful whitepapers from HP’s client vir-tualization website at www.hp.com/go/cv to learn more about HP’s Client Virtualization Reference Architectures:Citrix
HP Client Virtualization SMB Reference Architecture for Citrix VDI-in-a-Box. This document will help you design a simple appliance-like VDI configuration starting at 50 users.
(http://link.hp.com/u/08i7)
HP Reference Architecture for Client Virtualization: Client Virtualization from HP with Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. This paper focuses on HP’s rec-ommended approach to architecting virtual desktops with Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2.
(http://link.hp.com/u/08i6)
HP Reference Architecture for Client Virtualization: Client Virtualization from HP with Citrix XenDesktop and VMware vSphere 5. This paper presents HP’s Reference Architecture for Citrix XenDesktop on VMware. (http://link.hp.com/
u/08ib)
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Microsoft
HP Client Virtualization SMB Reference Architecture for Windows Server 2012. This paper describes HP’s recom-mended hardware and software components for small and medium businesses deploying Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft’s VDI solution. (http://link.hp.com/
u/08i9)
VMware
HP Client Virtualization SMB Reference Architecture for VMware View. This document provides a reference archi-tecture for 100-600 virtual desktops with VMware View.
(http://link.hp.com/u/08ia)
HP Gen8 Client Virtualization Enterprise Reference Architecture for VMware View 5.1. This paper outlines HP’s recommended approach to Client Virtualization with VMware and outlines the hardware and software needed as well as best practices for deployment. (http://link.hp.com/
u/08i8)