Being a VDI Rockstar in a Hybrid Work Era

For far too long, VDI administrators have had to deal with the brunt of end users. As 2020 struck, VDI administrators have single handedly saved business from extinction by ensuring users seamlessly work from home. VDI deployments were massively scaled to meet the requirements of Users. Due to the sudden change, many users have encountered issues which has caused VDI administrators to go through various firefighting drills.

Although we see the light at the end of the tunnel, work from home is here to stay and we expect more and more organizations embrace the flexible schedules of their employees. This means that the pressure and burden that VDI administrators face isn’t going to end soon.

Let’s talk about some of the issues VDI administrators as we move more into a hybrid model –

1)    Users are going to find a significant difference in the speed of Virtual Desktops when accessed from the office to when they access from home. The VDI desktops are likely to be slow at home.

2)    Users could work anytime of the day, which means VDI desktops must be fully available at any time of the day. Important datacenter tasks such as backups and replication can hamper the productivity of employees. 

Over the last couple of years, we at Uila, learnt many things (often the hard way) and have always looked for solutions to make things easier for administrators. To address the problems listed above and many more, we launched version 4.0 of Uila last week. 

Metrics don’t Lie! 

1. Monitoring the major VDI display protocols –
   1. Packet Loss – Uila can identify any kind of packet loss between the thin client and the VDI desktop.
   2. Latency – This network latency is measured between the VDI to the thin client

Measuring these Metrics quickly tell us the root cause. If an end user experiences higher packet loss and latency while working from home, the problem can be isolated to their home network or ISP. This would explain their problem.

 
2. Logon issues –

The ability to accurately and precisely logon duration is critical to ensure a good user experience. Uila breaks down the total logon duration into the most granular detail to help identify the bottlenecks. Some of the metrics that Uila measures is the registry load time, GPO load time, Process load time and the Shell Load.

 

 

 3. Application Visibility –

This is an important part of VDI monitoring. VDI administrators need to understand what the most critical applications for each individual user are. Using deep packet inspection Uila can automatically identify these applications for each end user. 

 

 

 

 4. Application Dependency Mapping –

Finally, last but not the least, Uila Application dependency mapping has proved time and time again that it is the fastest way to find bottlenecks. Uila can correlate the issue and identify the root cause of the issue to the application servers or the underlying infrastructure.

 

 If you want to talk to one of our experts on any question or how to optimize your VDI deployment, please click to get in touch with us. 

Uila also offers a 30-day Assessment program that is designed to provide an assessment of the health of the entire stack in your environment. As part of this assesment, the Uila expert will install the agentless, non-disruptive, application & infrastructure-agnostic Uila solution in your environment, analyze the results, provide the observations & recommendations on a 1 on 1 phone call, plus provide the final assessment report at the end for you to share with the rest of your team, or use to solve the challenges observed in your environment. Request your assessment NOW.