Top 10 VDI Mistakes (According to Dan Feller)

Dan Feller is a Lead Architect with the Citrix Consulting group, and has written extensively about XenDesktop. We found his series on the top ten mistakes people make when implementing desktop virtualization to be quite enlightening. In case you missed it, we thought we’d share his “top ten” list here, with links to the individual posts. We would highly recommend that you take the time to read through the series in its entirety:

#10 – Not calculating user bandwidth requirements
Back in the “good old days” of MetaFrame, when we didn’t particularly care about 3D graphics, multimedia content, etc., we could get by with roughly 20 Kbps of network bandwidth per user session. That’s not going to cut it for a virtualized desktop, for a number of reasons that Dan outlines in his blog post. He provides the following estimates for the average bandwidth required both with and without the presence of a pair of Citrix Branch Repeaters (which have some secret sauce that is specifically designed to accelerate Citrix traffic) between the client device and the virtual desktop session:

NOTE: These are estimates – your mileage may vary!

One thing that should come across loud and clear from the table above is what a huge difference the Citrix Branch Repeater can make in your bandwidth utilization. And as we’ve always said: you only buy hardware once – bandwidth costs go on forever!

#9 – Not considering the user profile
It should go without saying that user profiles are important. But if it’s number 9 on the list of things people most often screw up, then apparently it doesn’t. In a nutshell: If you mess up the users’ profiles, the users won’t be happy – logon/logoff performance will suffer, settings (including personalization) will be lost. If the users aren’t happy, they will be extremely vocal about it, and your VDI deployment will fail for lack of user buy-in and support. There are some great tools available for managing user profiles, including the Citrix Profile Manager, and the AppSense Environment Manager. AppSense can even maintain a consistent user experience across platforms – making sure that the user profile is the same regardless of whether the user is logged onto a Windows XP system, a Windows 7 System, or a Windows Server 2008 R2-based XenApp server.

Do yourself a favor and make sure you understand what your users’ profile requirements are, then investigate the available tools and plan accordingly.

#8 – Lack of an application virtualization strategy
How many applications are actually deployed in your organization? Do you even know? Are the versions consistent across all users? Which users use which applications? You have to understand the application landscape before you can decide how you’re going to deploy applications in your new virtualized desktop environment.

You have three basic choices on how to deliver apps:

1. You can install every application into a single desktop image. That means that whenever an application changes, you have to change your base image, and do regression testing to make sure that the new or changed application didn’t break something else.
2. You can create multiple desktop images with different application sets in each image, depending on the needs of your different user groups. Now if an application changes, you may have to change and do regression testing on multiple images. It’s worth noting that many organizations have been taking this approach in managing PC desktop images for years…but part of the promise of desktop virtualization is that, if done correctly, you can break out of that cycle. But to do that, you must…
3. Remove the applications from the desktop image and deliver them some other way: either by running them on a XenApp server, or by streaming the application using either the native XenApp streaming technology or Microsoft’s App-V (or some other streaming technology of your choice).

Ultimately, you may end up with a mixed approach, where some core applications that everyone uses are installed in the desktop image, and the rest are virtualized. But, once again, it’s critical to first understand the application landscape within your organization, and then plan (and test) carefully to determine the best application delivery approach.

#7 – Improper resource allocation
Quoting Dan: “Like me, many users only consume a fraction of their total potential desktop computing power, which makes desktop virtualization extremely attractive. By sharing the resources between all users, the overall amount of required resources is reduced. However, there is a fine line between maximizing the number of users a single server can support and providing the user with a good virtual desktop computing experience.”

This post provides some great guidelines on how to optimize the environment, depending on the underlying hypervisor you’re planning to use.

#6 – Protection from Anti-Virus (as well as protection from viruses)
If you are provisioning desktops from a shared read-only image (e.g., Citrix Provisioning Services), then any virus infection will go away when the virtual PC is rebooted, because changes to the base image – including the virus – are discarded by design. But you still need AV protection, because the virus can use the interval between infection and reboot to propagate itself to other systems. The gotcha here is that the AV software itself can cause serious performance issues if it is not configured properly. Dan provides a great outline in this post for how to approach AV protection in a virtual desktop environment.

#5 – Managing the incoming storm
In most organizations, the majority of users arrive and start logging into their desktops at approximately the same time. What you don’t want is dozens, or hundreds, of virtual desktops trying to start up simultaneously, because it will hammer your virtualization environment. There are some very specific things you need to do to survive the “boot storm,” and Dan outlines them in this post.

#4 – Not optimizing the virtual desktop image
Dan provides several tips on things you should do to optimize your desktop image for the virtual environment. He also has specific sections on his blog that deal with recommended optimizations for Windows 7.

#3 – Not spending your cache wisely
Specifically, we’re talking about configuring the system cache on your Provisioning Server appropriately, depending on the OS and amount of RAM in your Provisioning Server, and the type of storage repository you’re using for your vDisk(s).

#2 – Using VDI defaults
Default settings are great for getting a small Proof of Concept up and running quickly. But as you scale up your VDI environment, there are a number of things you should do. If you ignore them, performance will suffer, which means that users will be upset, which means that your VDI project is more likely to fail.
#1 – Improper storage design
This shouldn’t be a surprise. We’re talking here about how to calculate the “functional IOPS” available from a given storage system, and what that means in relation to the number of IOPS a typical user will need at boot time, logon time, working hours (which will vary depending on the users themselves), and logoff time.

Just to round things out, Dan also tossed in a few “honorable mentions,” like the improper use of NIC teaming or not optimizing the NIC configuration in Provisioning Servers, trying to provision images to hardware with mismatched hardware device drivers (generally not an issue if you’re provisioning into a virtual environment), and failing to have a good business reason for launching a VDI project in the first place.

Again, this post was intended to whet your appetite by giving you enough information that you’ll want to read through Dan’s individual “top ten” posts. We would heartily recommend that you do that – you’ll probably learn a lot. (We certainly did!)