The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/51267
LESSONS LEARNED Printing: After much testing, we determined that a centralized print cluster in the data center provided the most optimal printing performance and experience for all our VDI users. Virus Scanning: We're currently running Microsoft Forefront on all virtual desktops. We perform quick scans nightly and full scans once per week on Saturday. Scans are staggered by groups of virtual desktops via SCCM to avoid maxing out all memory, CPU and disk IO resources, as all the desktops compete for them at the same time. We're currently assessing products that integrate with VMware's vShield Endpoint product. vShield Endpoint offloads all antivirus and antimalware processing to a dedicated virtual appliance so that you don't have to run an instance of each on each individual virtual desktop. KNOW PAIN … Early adoption of any new technology does not usually come without some level of pain. Early adoption of VDI certainly was no exception to that rule. It was quite painful in the beginning. When we did our initial research, we talked to a number of large companies and read numerous white papers describing successful deployments. However, what we found is that they were all either single-site LAN or campus-based installations. 96 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer It became evident very early on that our coast-to-coast WAN-based deployment was a beast of a different color altogether for VMware. They had no WAN-based PCoIP deployments resembling our design from which to draw experience. We couldn't get any solid critical information from VMware on what the PCoIP bandwidth requirements were because it simply didn't exist. It literally took several months of testing, measuring and adjusting internally before we could finally get a clear understanding of how it worked and what the requirements would be. No pain, no gain, right? "If you don't get the user experience right, you'll most definitely know pain." VDI cluster guest-to-host server density was another pain point early on. We based a lot of our infrastructure planning on the information supplied to us from VMware, which quoted six to eight guests per CPU core when using Nehalem-based servers. Of course, this type of vendor information is always going to be based on best-case scenarios, which is usually out