Peer to Peer Magazine

LESSONS LEARNED Deploying the Virtual Desktop: Know Pain, Know Gain Rick Varju, Director of Engineering & Operations at Foley & Lardner LLP T he typical desktop in the enterprise as we know it today is not only shrinking, but in some cases, it's being reduced to zero — a zero client, that is! Indeed, virtualization has been a real game changer. Over the past two years, I and a group of others at Foley & Lardner have navigated our way through the pains, gains and benefits of VDI and now have over 850 virtual desktops in production. It's been quite the early-adopter journey, and we've learned a great deal along the way. We're now all in with VDI and not looking back. VDI PRODUCT SELECTION While Foley & Lardner chose VMware View for its VDI deployment, and we're happy with it, it is not my intent to advocate one VDI product over another. I've been involved in the extensive testing of both VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop and found both to be quite similar in terms of overall performance and the end-user experience when configured optimally. There are several factors that go into making a VDI product selection: internal staff product familiarity and experience, existing product investment and business requirements, just to name a few. While some of the details here are specific to the VMware View product, many of the lessons learned can be applied to both platforms. FIRM ENVIRONMENT AND VDI VITALS For context purposes, I should note that we have slightly fewer than 1,000 attorneys and roughly 2,300 personnel in total. We have 21 office locations, including offices in Tokyo, Shanghai and Brussels, but have not deployed virtual desktops in any of our international offices yet. 94 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer Data Center and WAN: All core systems and services (including VDI) are centralized to a primary colocation data center facility with LexisNexis in Springfield, Ohio, with most systems and services fully replicated to our secondary data center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We have three MPLS WAN circuits in place in all but two of our domestic office locations. All three circuits are 300Mbps at the primary data center and 100Mbps at the secondary data center. Two of the three circuits deliver 45Mbps to each office location. One is dedicated to VDI; the other is dedicated to high- definition video. Both are configured to fail over to each other automatically during maintenance events or service outages. The third is a 20Mbps circuit that can burst up to "Our original cluster hardware plans were off by at least 50 percent!" 50Mbps if necessary and is used for voice and all other non-VDI related data, with the ability to fail over to the other two WAN circuits automatically as necessary. All VDI traffic traverses the WAN from each office back to the primary data center in Springfield. While we do have acceleration in place on all WAN circuits today, PCoIP traffic is encrypted and thus cannot be accelerated. We've over-provisioned our WAN circuits to some degree, but did so intentionally to accommodate both current and future growth plans — and we got a great deal from Time Warner!

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