Wednesday 18 April 2012

VDI Assessment Tools


I quite often talk about virtualization as part of the ongoing application migration story and I thought (since I now work for Quest) I should talk a little bit more about virtualization tools. There are quite a few about, but I thought that I should highlight the following technologies.

Quest VDI Assessment 
Quest VDI Assessment analyzes user behavior and desktop performance over time to build up a complete picture of application usage and resource consumption across the organization. Basically, it's installed in your pre-VDI desktop environment, then it watches what the users do, determines which applications are being used, monitors the intensity (or lack thereof) of each user workload, watches for peripheral usage, and more. After collecting that data for 30 days or longer, it builds a nice report that identifies the best virtualization candidates for different virtualization technologies and uses the results to help build out an ROI model that is unique to the organization. 

The Quest VDI Assessment tool is;
  • Available as an ESX or Hyper-V appliance
  • Identifies which of your users are a best fit for hosted or local (offline) VDI, Terminal Server/RD Session Host or Application Virtualization
  • Analyzes and reports on your current network, user and application usage
  • Assesses the viability of a Windows 7 deployment
  • Calculates improvement in VM density from leveraging Hyper-V Dynamic Memory
  • Pre-determines desktop, network, data center and storage needs to help you build a successful plan to migrate and manage your users with virtual desktops and applications
You can find out more here: Quest VDI Assessment
VDI Flash Calculator
You should  give Andre Leibovici's online
 VDI Flash Calculator a try. Remember, properly sizing your VDI environment is one of the most important aspects of creating a VDI infrastructure design. Without knowing and understanding the workloads and the types of users in your environment, you could be setting yourself up for failure.
If you want to know more about the VDI calculator options and features read the Manual at http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=1927 or check out the VMware View Calculator Video Training at http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=2551.
Login VSI
I have always been a fan of Login Consultants (many reasons, and for many years) and part of any good VDI management strategy is being able to determine the optimal hardware configuration required to support the required number of users and applications in your environment. 
Login VSI is a  virtualization specific benchmarking tool to measure the performance and scalability of centralized desktop environments such as SBC and VDI.
Login VSI helps with benchmarking, change impact analysis, load-testing and capacity planning
To find out more, read here: http://www.loginvsi.com/
Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer
This free tool benefits from years of real world experience of desktop "optimizing knowledge," which is then exposed as a list of 40 various optimization settings that can be enabled or disabled using either a GUI interface or using the command line. This simple application allows you to make file and registry tweaks quickly and easily, and it provides the ability to store the details of the changes made for audit purposes. Although the tool is written for Quest vWorkspace environments, it works just as well with either Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View.
As with Quest's assessment tool, you can find support for this free optimization tool on the Quest community [16].
SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor
You've heard all about the storage I/O performance demands of VDI, so how do you keep track of storage response times and latency issues within your environment? That's where the free SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor  tool comes into play.


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