By Ken Copas
Building out an end-user computing (EUC) environment right means the infrastructure is nearly invisible to end users. But as with anything that appears easy and elegant on its surface, there are quite a few complexities underneath the hood.
While there are many factors to consider, here are a few questions to ask before building out your EUC environment.
Is the Tail Wagging the Dog?
This scenario happens very frequently: The supporting infrastructure is purchased and implemented before a plan and design is performed to determine the appropriate hardware requirements. Best practice is to understand what you’re trying to accomplish from a business perspective first, architect the required supporting infrastructure and design the blueprint with professional services, and then purchase and implement the gear.
Take that same concept and apply it to a proof-of-concept (POC) environment, whether it’s the full Horizon Suite or individual View, Workspace (our unified application publishing platform), or Mirage (our physical and virtual image management solution) components. While it can be fast and easy to install and set up a working POC of these VMware products, this temporary environment is only for the purpose of “kicking the tires.” These POC environments should never be exposed to production users and expected to perform and scale appropriately in a production environment. To use VMware products correctly, again there needs to be a plan and design in place, which requires a great deal of up-front assessment, current environment analysis, and due diligence around your business use cases.
You’ll need absolute subject matter expertise to determine what storage to use (by the way, getting storage right is a key success factor), what’s the aggregate I/O throughput, CPU and memory requirements–all of these decisions play a huge part in how the production environment will perform and scale.
Why Not Pick and Choose?
Here’s a good one: what would happen if you only deployed VDI with Horizon View (our virtual desktop solution) without Horizon Workspace or Mirage?
While in addition to your standard production VDI environment, you would have the capability to run full desktop OS images on a variety of mobile devices such as laptops, tablets or even smartphones, users will most likely encounter issues with screen real estate and experience interface frustrations with mouse and keyboard options.
As I’m sure you are aware, the desktop OS itself can require significant compute, memory, and disk resources that can cause performance issues when using VDI on mobile devices. There are many other factors that can cause performance degradation as well. Adding Horizon Workspace to your EUC environment may give you access to applications in an environment that’s native to your device with improved response time and it can provide an overall better user experience.
How you address questions like these will have a profound impact on user satisfaction with your EUC environment, which at the end of the day is ultimately the key measure of success. So again, be sure to allow the time and attention required for proper plan and design.
What’s your Roadmap?
This is a great question. VMware has a unique holistic view of this space, as well as a comprehensive roadmap, which I have yet to see from any other company. The completeness of vision, in my mind, is huge for customers to consider as they think through potential EUC solutions.
Even if you don’t go with VMware, you need to understand where your vendors are taking you. How does their roadmap address your needs? Look at where that vendor is going to be in two to three years and make sure you fully understand how that company will help you get where you want to go.
Who are your people?
One last piece of the equation is something you shouldn’t take for granted: talent. Standing up an EUC solution incorrectly can mean longer project timetables, missed deadlines, frustrated users, and business disruption. This technology has its own set of potential pitfalls and nuances. Make sure you have genuine subject matter expertise in place, whether in-house or professional services sourced from your trusted advisors.
Ken Copas currently serves as a practice manager for End User Computing Professional Services at VMware. Prior to joining VMware, Ken’s corporate experience includes serving as the practice director of cloud computing and IT services management for GlassHouse Technologies, as a business development executive for IBM and as an IT executive for NetJets, Inc. Ken holds a degree in Computer & Information Science from the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, as well as a Master’s in Business Administration from the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University.
