The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/27607
“We’ve found the user experience is much better going to a virtual desktop.” And while that’s a good starting point, you really need to make sure you have a good load testing strategy to test your storage — as the capacity usage of your storage increases, its overall performance is going to drop. You’re not going to see a performance issue when you put your first ten or 100 users on it, but you will when you start to peak out your capacity. Go in with a game plan of how to architect your servers or your storage, but definitely plan a phase of the project for load testing. There are tools out there specifically for load testing. One you’ll see talked about is Login VSI. That’s the one we used, and it was very good. • Network . Benchmark the latency and bandwidth across your WAN. Obviously, these will impact performance and how many users are coming across the WAN. If you have the ability, there are tools that can simulate your latency and bandwidth, and do monitoring and testing. There are also calculators available in white papers to tell you how much bandwidth you’ll need per user and about any potential latencies. • Data center. Servers are pretty straightforward. With the help of white papers, you can decide how many users you want per server. In other words, how many eggs do you want in one basket if you have a problem? you can go with a “mainframe” (i.e., a whole bunch of users on one server), or a few redundant servers, in case there is a problem. • Client devices. You’ll want to ask yourself a few questions. Can you repurpose existing physical desktops so you don’t need to make a new investment in hardware on the client side? Does it make more sense to go the thin client route or a very scaled down desktop route? What is the culture of your existing physical desktop; will the move to VDI be the “lockdown” project; will it have a negative impact on the adoption of VDI? What’s right for your business at the time? • Support tools. If a user or office says, “Hey, this is slow,” or “There’s a problem,” how are you going to monitor or support it? Here, you really want to look within the VDI channel or VDI protocol to make sure you have all of your metrics and stats available to quickly pinpoint where the problem is. 60 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer • Human organization. Finally, the nontechnical topic — how to organize around VDI. When this goes into production, who’s going to support it, who is going to own it? This is one of those solutions that crosses every team (client-side, network, applications, servers, storage, etc.) if you’re set up like a traditional IT department. If there’s a problem once you hit operation or production, who gets the escalated helpdesk ticket? Who supports the user or office that is having the problem? You want to think about this up front because it might decide what solution or vendor you choose for VDI. If you’re doing desktop support and virtual application or remote access support using a specific vendor’s solution, then it might make sense to keep that knowledge when it gets down to supporting users and virtual desktops. Use this as one of the input decisions before you get into production and suddenly discover that you don’t have a point person who owns the issues that will undoubtedly come up. Look and Then Leap With our implementation of the virtual desktop, we’re now a part of the 85 percent of companies either implementing or taking a look at VDI, and it’s clearly the direction in which we’re all headed. We’ve reduced pain and lowered costs, all while improving the way our department works and supports the firm. Once an IT department has answered the majority of the questions raised by the prospect of VDI, it’s time to hop on board this bandwagon. ILTA Christopher Lewis is the Manager of Software Services for SNR Denton. He manages the Citrix environment, packaged software deployment, the desktop platform, and mobility solutions. Chris is managing the firm’s migration strategy to Citrix as the primary computing platform, originally using a published applications approach with XenApp, now moving to published desktops with XenDesktop. Prior to SNR Denton, Chris spent 10 years in IT consulting with Accenture and Avanade, delivering and managing large custom software and infrastructure deployment projects. He can be reached at christopher.lewis@snrdenton.com.