8 Common Pitfalls of Virtual Desktops and Apps(AND HOW TO AVOID THEM)

GET ON THE PATH TO SUCCESSFUL DESKTOP TRANSFORMATION

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Pitfall #1: Not Involving Users

How to Avoid

Involving end users is key to understanding how workers perform their day-to-day jobs. Don’t dive right into technical requirements, instead dive into understanding user requirements.

• Interview users to see how they would take advantage of the flexibility and new services provided by virtual desktops and apps

• Understand what users perceive as shortcomings

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Pitfall #2: PuttingTogether theWrong Team

How to Avoid

A common mistake of virtual desktops and apps projects is to build a team around virtualization architects rather than desktop administrators.

For a successful project, you need the close involvement of the people in your organization who design and manage desktop and application environments.

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Pitfall #3: Defining Virtual Desktops and Apps Use Cases

How to Avoid

Virtual desktops and apps use cases are based on workers and their job requirements, the applications and devices they use. When designing use cases, consider the users and the work they do.

Don’t oversimplify. Create enough use cases to cover the full range of user requirements without creating a lot of special-needs desktops.

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Pitfall #4: Not Conducting a Pre-Assessment

How to Avoid

Without a pre-assessment,assumptions will be used to design the solution, which adds risk to the project and could lead to additional capital investments that could have been avoided.

Use desktop and applicationpre-assessment software. These typically use an agent installed on the local desktop that feeds metrics into a central reporting server.

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Pitfall #5: Not Properly Optimizingthe Desktop Image

How to Avoid

Virtual desktops are quite different from physical desktops, in part because they live in a world of shared resources. They should be optimized accordingly.

Work with users by conductingsurveys or workshops with business unit representatives to understand the impact of optimizations.

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Pitfall #6: Not Understanding Impacts to thePerformance of Other Systems

How to Avoid

When moving to virtual desktops and apps from traditional desktops, make sure you understand the full range of performance impacts stemming from network bandwidth, storage area network (SAN) array processor utilization, and display protocols.

Your users can help you generate realistic proof-of-concept or pilot workloads to validate their requirements for graphic bandwidth, storage, I/O, and more.

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Pitfall #7: Not Developing an ApplicationDeployment Strategy

How to Avoid

If applications are installed on user login, this limits the design choices, but a virtualized environment can still be properly designed to meet this constraint.

Consider how applications will be packaged and the impact on performance if updates need to be pushed out to a large number of desktops in a short amount of time.

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Pitfall #8: Skippingor Mismanaging the Pilot Project

How to Avoid

Organizations that skip the pilot phase, or run a pilot that doesn’t produce a clear outcome, risk failure when an environment goes into production or never moves out of the pilot phase.

A properly managed pilot should engage real users from various use cases to pilot the environment and generate meaningful load data.

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